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A MEMORIAL VOLUME 



LECTURES ON THE HISTORY 



OF 



English Literature 



PROFESSOR WILLIAM MARVEL NEVIN, LL D. 




EDITED BY 

REV. THEODORE APPEE, D. D. 



LANCASTER, PA.: 
INTELLIGENCER PRINTING OFFICE 

1895 



82,0. Cj 










COPYRIGHT BY 

THEODORE APPEL 



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(5- 



IN MBMORIAM 



IN MEMORY OF 

WILLIAM MARVEL NEVIN, LL.D., 

AN HONORED TEACHER, 
A CULTIVATED SCHOLAR, 
A POLISHED GENTLEMAN, 
AN HUMBLE CHRISTIAN, 

AND 

A MAN WITHOUT GUILE, 
THIS VOLUME IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED 

BY 

MANY ADMIRING PUPILS AND FRIENDS. 

D. D. D. 

Anno Domini 
1895 



W. u. Hensei,, 
Walter M. Franklin, 
Theodore Appel, 

Publishing Committee. 



PREFACE 



THE publication of this volume is due to a combination of cir- 
cumstances, to which we may here be allowed briefly to refer. 
The author of these Lectures was for a long time Professor of the 
Ancient Languages and of Belles-Lettres in Marshall College, Mer- 
cersburg, Pa., and subsequently after its removal to Lancaster, Pa., 
in Franklin and Marshall College. In the year 1872, the Alumni 
of the two Colleges undertook to endow a professorship of the 
Bnglish Language and Literature, of which Professor Nevin was 
to be the proper occupant. The effort met with an encouraging 
decree of success. The new departure relieved him of a large 
amount of labor, and gave him a new impulse to engage in his 
work. He was not satisfied to teach his classes simply with the 
use of a textbook ; and after a thorough examination of the best 
authorities and critics in the department of Literature, he com- 
menced to write out his own Lectures for the benefit of his students. 
As the time allotted him in the College curriculum was limited, 
it became necessary for him to take for the most part only a 
comprehensive or general view of the subject, referring his hearers 
to more extensive works for further information. 

These Lectures are based on the conception that Literature, like 
History in general, is an organic process or growth. It springs up 
out of a nation's life and it is its proper expression, always modi- 
fied by its racial tendencies, its degree of civilization, its climate 
and soil, and its relations with surrounding nations. As it is a spe- 
cial product it, however, reacts upon the general life surrounding 
it ; and next to religion it is, no doubt, the most potent factor in the 
advancement and civilization of the world at large. In Europe, 
Christianity was the secret power which raised its savage, uncul- 
tured people out of barbarism, and made it the light and guid- 
ance of the nations sitting in darkness. 

In this view of the case, English Literature was by no means an 
aboriginal growth in England, as seems to be sometimes supposed. 
All along it was stimulated and modified by the Continental 
nations, France, Germany, Spain, and especially Italy. It retained 



VI PREFACE 

its English character, certainly ; but it carried with it the genial 
life of Europe at the same time. The English language, most 
effective as it is, is now spoken in all parts of the globe, and 
wherever it goes its literature will follow it. With the rest of 
European nations, provided they live in peace with each other, 
England will thus be largely the means of accomplishing the 
redemption of the world. But in this good work it must include 
the England in America also. Quite likely our own nation is des- 
tined in the hands of Providence to be the means of uniting Europe, 
Asia, Africa, and Oceanica in one brotherhood of peace on earth, 
good-will towards men. So may it be. 

It is believed that the present volume is calculated to furnish 
interesting and useful information to readers generally, as well as 
to students in particular. It is, therefore, presented to the public 
with the hope that it may receive a favorable reception and a 
generous appreciation. It should have a place, especially in fami- 
lies where there are young people. So we think. 



INTRODUCTORY LECTURE 



OF the literature and arts of all Northern nations, or, at any rate, 
of those of Gothic or Teutonic origin, it is a characteristic 
trait that the aesthetic element is generally of less account than 
the intellectual and moral ; whilst, on the other hand, of the 
literature and arts of more Southern nations, and especially of 
those of Grecian and Latin descent, the moral and intellectual are 
regarded as being of less account in their composition than is the 
aesthetic. Not is it to be wondered at, therefore, when France 
and Italy, far back in the Dark Ages, had been completely over- 
run and thoroughly conquered by the Goths and other Teutonic 
tribes, and these had been received among their own people as 
fellow-citizens, and certainly their superiors in arms and energy, 
that for a long while afterwards it was the Gothic style and man- 
ners, when culture was being received, that was most in vogue 
among them, and that Gothic taste was in the ascendancy. Emerg- 
ing from a state of barbarism, into which all Western Europe had 
fallen, the first essays in art and literature, which were made by 
the artists and poets of those two countries, were altogether of 
Gothic style. By the inspired painters of the Middle Ages the 
beautiful as such was introduced into their pictures, if it ever was 
introduced at all, not so much for its own sake, to be admired, as 
for its own ultimate moral effect; and for this purpose, indeed, by 
them the ugly, the vulgar and the odious were far to be preferred 
as being most likely to impress the deepest lessons on the minds 
of the beholders. As proof whereof, and sample besides of the 
Gothic style, we would direct attention to that typical master- 
piece of Mediaeval art, the great fresco of the Triumph of Death, 
painted by some great unknown artist in the fourteenth century, 
to be seen in the Gothic cloister of the gravej^ard of Pisa ; and 
thus described by Vernon Lee in a late number of the Contem- 
porary Review: 

" With wonderful realization of character and situation," she 
says, ' ' has the artist depicted the prosperous in the world, the dap- 
per youths and damsels seated, with dogs and falcons, beneath the 



Vlll INTRODUCTORY LECTURE 

orchard trees, amusing themselves with Decameronian tales and 
sound of lute and psaltery, unconscious of the colossal scythe 
wielded by the gigantic, dishevelled Death, and which in a second 
will descend and mow them to the ground ; while the crowd of 
beggars — ragged, maimed, paralyzed, leprous, grovelling on their 
withered limbs — see and implore Death, and cry, stretching forth 
their arms, their stumps, and their crutches. Further on three 
kings, in long embroidered robes and gold-trimmed shovel caps, 
Lewis the Emperor, Uguccioni of Pisa, and Castruccio of Lucca, 
with their retinue of ladies and squires and hounds and hawks, 
are riding quietly through a wood. Suddenly their horses stop, 
draw back ; the emperor's bay stretches out his long neck, sniffing 
the air ; the kings strain forward to see, one holding his nose 
from the stench of Death that meets him ; and before them are 
three open coffins, in which lie, in three loathsome stages of cor- 
ruption, from blue and bloated putrescence to well-nigh fleshless 
decay, three crowned corpses. This is the Triumph of Death; 
the grim and horrible jest of the Middle Ages ; equality in decay ; 
kings, emperors, ladies, knights, beggars, cripples, this is what 
we all come to be, stinking corpses, Death our lord, our only just 
and lasting sovereign, reigns impartially over all." 

Here it is to be observed that all the objects introduced, whether 
pleasing or loathsome, alive or dead, are derived immediately from 
the artist's own surrounding world and Mediaeval times ; but 
though thus copied from life or death and nature around, these 
are used mostly as a means towards the attainment of a higher 
end, being, like the dark and gloomy style of Gothic Architecture, 
with its pointed arches, which, however, is all pleasing in itself, 
intended to turn the thoughts of the beholder away from the decay- 
ing things of time and sense, and to direct them heavenward. 

In the Renaissance of the fifteenth century, when in Italy a love 
of the beautiful for its own sake was beginning to be entertained, 
having been first awakened in her painters by the sight of some 
corroded, earth-stained sculpture, exhumed by workmen at home 
or brought by merchants from Greece or Rome, having escaped 
from utter demolition from their having been hid for many 
centuries underneath the still accumulating debris of succeed- 
ing ages, this love of the beautiful for its own sake was not to 
be satisfied by the restoration of ancient art. Every civilized 
nation has its own art, or style of art, suitable to the char- 
acter of its own age ; and this, however admired, can never be 



INTRODUCTORY LECTURE IX 

revived and made their own by any later civilized people. The 
ancient pagan life and manners of Europe had long since passed 
away, and been thoroughly superseded by the all-absorbing inter- 
ests of Christianity in the Mediaeval times. Painting was the 
natural offspring of these times and of the new civilization : a 
thing of the Middle Ages, original and spontaneous, it could 
never be supplanted by sculpture. In proportion, indeed, as the 
new civilization developed, the old civilization was exhumed. 

The Italian painters, however, in their designs did not imitate the 
antique, but they studied it; they obtained through the fragments 
of antique sculpture a glimpse into the life of antiquity, and that 
glimpse served to correct the vulgarism and distortion of the 
Mediaeval life of the fifteenth century. ' ' Here then, ' ' says Vernon 
Lee, "were the two great factors in the. art of the Renaissance, 
the study of nature and the study of the antique brought side to 
side, both understood slowly, imperfectly: the one counteracting 
the effects of the other ; the study of nature now scaring away all 
antique influence ; the study of the antique now distorting all imi- 
tation of nature; rival forces confusing the artist and marring 
his work, until, when each could receive its due, the one corrected 
the other and they combined, producing by this marriage of the 
living reality with the dead but immortal beauty of the old, the 
great art of Michael Angelo, of Raphael, and of Titian: double 
like its origin, antique and modern, real and ideal." 

The same process also took place with regard to Literature. By 
the revival of letters in the fifteenth century the old civilization 
was brought into close rivalry with the new. Real Latin began 
to be studied only when real Italian began to be written. Dante, 
Petrarch and, Boccaccio were at once the founders of modern 
literature, and the exponents of the literature of antiquity. The 
strong present was to profit by the past. It must not be pre- 
sumed, however, that the Mediaeval mind was induced to return 
to the ancient for the substance of its literature. The Christian 
world can never go back into the pagan world in search for the 
True and the Good, but it must ever go back there for the Beautiful. 
The Italian poets, then, in the fifteenth century, did not make use 
of the restored Latin to express their thoughts; but from the study 
of its ancient letters they derived a charm and improved taste, 
which they imparted to their own modern ideas and imaginings of 
a Gothic sort ; and thus they produced a literature of their own, suhV 
able to their newly formed Romance language, to be admired for 



X INTRODUCTORY LECTURE 

its own sake, without any further design; and of the most romantic 
description . 

That period of English Literature, extending from the middle 
of the fourteenth century to the close of the first quarter of the 
seventeenth, has latterly been called by some its Romance period. 
It has been thus designated on account of its continuing to remain 
under the influence — thus deriving its character — of a style of 
life and manners that had existed in the Mediaeval times, and was 
still in some measure preserved, but mediated and much improved 
from first having come over into England through the literatures of 
the Romance languages of France and Italy. This appellation, how- 
ever, w T e think, designates properly only one side of the literature 
of that period. It has another side running parallel with this 
throughout its whole course, which should with more propriety 
be called its Teutonic or Gothic period. Not through the Romance 
languages of an} 7 nations of the Continent had this style of letters 
come down to England, but immediately through the Anglo- 
Saxon of the early Mediaeval times of Old England herself. These 
two kinds, like two streams, converging into one, ran together 
for a long time without commingling. In the rough and rugged 
Anglo-Saxon, ere it had been commingled with the Norman 
French, w 7 e have in Caedmon's Paraphrase or Bible-Epic, the 
Teutonic or Gothic element all alone. Then afterwards, along- 
side of the poems of Chaucer, which are deeply pervaded with the 
Romance spirit, w T e have at the same time the alliterate poem of 
Piers Plowman by William Eangland, highly allegorical, moral, 
and satirical, as it behooves a Gothic poem to be. 

In the Fair) 7 Queen of Spenser, however, we find the two ele- 
ments w T ell met, but not always commingling. Sometimes in his 
stanzas the Gothic current is the stronger, and sometimes the Ro- 
mance. Now we have the moral and the beautiful flowing harmo- 
niously and charmingly together ; but again to make vice more 
odious, to be seen in its results, we have occasionally subjects intro- 
duced as unpleasing and objects as loathsome and disgusting as are 
any to be met with in the great Mediaeval painting of the Triumph 
of Death : all for their moral effect. Again, reversely, on the aesthet- 
ical side, we sometimes have presentations set forth almost too 
alluring and voluptuous to be consistent, some might think, with 
strict morality; as, for instance, that of those nude nymphs, who 
disport themselves so wantonly in the charming crystal lake hard 
by the Bower of Bliss, partly imitated and in some parts closely 



INTRODUCTORY LECTURE XI 

translated from Tasso's description, in his Jerusalem Delivered, 
or like females thus engaged in the enchanted gardens of the For- 
tunate Isles. 

But between the two poets is this remarkable difference to be 
observed. With Spenser, like a true Northerner, the moral is 
alwa} r s in the ascendancy at last, and with Tasso, like a true 
Southerner, the aesthetic. Not only does Guyon, the knight 
of Temperance, break down ' ' all those pleasant bowres and pallace 
brave, with vigor pitiless ' ' — in the Fairy Queen — but he also takes 
Acrasie, the fair enchantress herself, in a subtile net, devised for 
the purpose, and has her tied in chains of adamant; whereas 
in Jerusalem Delivered, Rinaldo, though rescued by his friends, 
from the deep enchantments of the fair sorceress, Armida, by 
which he has been bound and enslaved, still remained, though 
afterwards severed from her afar, under the power of her remem- 
bered personal charms ; and in the end when the opposing army, 
in which she moves conspicuous, on account of her remarkable 
beauty and favoring magic arts, is utterly routed, and Rinaldo 
has slain all her defending lovers ; yet herself he injures not, but 
checking her violent hand upraised for self-destruction which she 
meditates in her grief, he consoles her with his love; and, though 
he a Christian and she an infidel, becomes thereafter her gallant 
defender and avowed stalwart knight 

In Milton, however, we have the two diversities harmoniously 
combined. Restrained by his own severe judgment and exquisite 
taste, he preserves the happy medium, and is never borne too far 
away on either side. In his poems we have no luxurious scenes 
portrayed of doubtful morality. His failings — if he have any — 
like those of the good parson in the Deserted Village of Gold- 
smith, all lean to virtue's side. With him the aesthetical is never 
in the ascendancy. It constitues the graceful outward form of 
which the moral and intellectual are the superior solid contents, 
whereby it is rendered itself still more spiritual and refined ; and 
from this harmonious combination is produced a poetry of the 
sublimest sort. 

It is the Drama, however, and not the epical poetry of any 
country which, being fed by the popular favor, declares best the 
prevailing taste and humor of its times. Those old Mysteries and 
Miracle plays of Mediaeval times, first brought over from France, 
and designed by the priests to present Biblical history and the 
legends of the saints before the eyes of the unlettered laity, in 



Xll INTRODUCTORY LECTURE 

visible form, first enacted in the churches, but afterwards in alk 
the principal cities and towns, on great decorated stages on six 
wheels, proceeding with their hal tings at proper points for exhi- 
bition, in regular succession a long series, through all the princi- 
pal streets, though on the grandest imaginable scale, were yet 
rude and Gothic in their character, and, though extending in time 
down to the sixteenth century in certain towns, they continued to 
be rude and Gothic to the end, and nothing else. The true Eng- 
lish drama, however, of the sixteenth century does not owe its 
origin to these. It was suggested first by the Latin plays per- 
formed by the boys at Eton and Oxford, taken mostly from those 
of Terence or Plautus. But it was not by forming their plays 
wholly on classic models that English playwrights succeded best 
in the end. Those were more fortunate who, influenced, indeed, 
by a classical taste, which from the recent Revival of Letters was 
now generally diffused, yet, to suit the spirit of the times, being- 
men of unrivalled genius, created a drama called the Roman- 
tic , which soon became universally approved and popular . Between 
this and the classic there is little or no affinity. They belong to 
different states of civilization . The one is pagan and the other is 
Christian. The one is ancient, simple, expressive, restricted, 
sculpturesque and Grecian; the other is modern, complex, sug- 
gestive, unrestrained, picturesque and Gothic. 

The Romantic influence on English Literature of the period , we 
have just now been considering, was derived first from France, as 
we have seen, and afterwards from Italy. Of these two countries 
the literatures, though chastened and refined, during the Renais- 
sance, by Grecian and Roman taste revived, were still in sub- 
stance Gothic and Mediaeval. As the French, however, are a 
Southern people and more Roman than Gothic or Teutonic in 
their origin, and by no means ever so deeply imbued with the 
Romantic spirit as were the Italians, it is not to be wondered at 
that, after the Renaissance, they were the first people to leave 
behind all influence of Mediaeval life and manners, and come almost 
wholly under that of the ancient Roman and classic. When, 
then, after the Restoration of the Stuarts in England, the Italian 
influence had ended and the French became supreme, it is not to 
be wondered at again, that the English lost all that Romance which 
they had derived from Italy; and that their literature, like that of 
of the French whom they closely followed, became almost wholly 
classical in its style and finish. 



INTRODUCTORY LECTURE Xlll 

The English, being a Teutonic race, and, therefore, less art- 
loving, were, nevertheless, more moral and intellectual; but when 
from their aversion to the too strict rule and over-sanctified 
morality of the Puritans, from whose authority they had just now 
been freed, and had adopted, at any rate at court, the gayer life 
and showier manners of the French, being naturally of grosser 
appetites and stronger passions than were these ; and now less 
restrained by any moral or religious feelings from those manners 
which they had thus assumed from the French, they became 
actually more immoral and corrupt than were the French them- 
selves, whose pleasures, from their being of a more sesthetical 
character, were always more tastefully voluptuous and classically 
refined. 

"Upon the death of Milton," as expressed by Mr. Henry Mor- 
ley, " the great Elizabethan age of imaginative poetry had said its 
last word; and fully fourteen years before his death, the spirit of 
Literature had undergone a total change in England. With the Res- 
toration of Charles II begins the period of French influence upon 
English literature — an influence that was not effectually broken 
until the close of the French Revolution, one hundred and thirty 
years afterward." This has been called the Classical Period. 
During its time a finished and artificial style was sought after and 
at length attained, beneficial to prose indeed, but injurious to 
poetry. "Our literature," says Mr. Thomas Arnold, "required 
a prose which conformed to the law of prose ; and that it might 
acquire this the more surely it compelled poetry, as in France, to 
conform to the laws of prose likewise. The classic verse of 
French poetry was the Alexandrine, a measure favorable to the 
qualities of regularity, uniformity, precision, balance. Gradually 
a measure favorable to those very same qualities — the ten-syllable 
couplet — established itself in the classic verse of England, until in 
the eighteenth century it had become the ruling form of our 
poetry." 

To suit this style, all blank verse, so well adapted for tragedy 
and epic poetry, was set aside as being too loose and free, and that 
grand old stanza first used by Chaucer, and afterwards more 
lengthened out by Spenser from its Gothic structure, so admirably 
suited to his genius, was universally eschewed, as being too 
cumbersome and antiquated for the times • and all verse of any pre- 
tensions was subjected to the strict rules and narrow limits of the 
rhymed couplet. Thus by the prevailing taste and public opinion 



XIV INTRODUCTORY LECTURE 

the poet was hampered and bound down, to prevent his ravings, 
as it were, in a strait-jacket; whereby was all genuine imagination 
ruled or pressed out of him; whereas of this, with the lover and 
the lunatic, he should be "all compact." 

From the artificial, mechanical and didactic style, wrought out 
at length to perfection under Pope, and by his successors made 
intolerable, at the close of the eighteenth century, many poets 
sought to be delivered, and began to return to living nature, whose 
charms, as seen abroad, they described accurately and lovingly, 
without any intervening, classical impersonations ; and to utter 
their poetical feelings, unrestrained by rigid rules, in their proper 
verse, proceeding immediately, warm and impulsive from the heart. 
As with times more congenial with their own, they were disposed 
to cast their eyes, besides, on the rude but grand beginnings of 
modern society, as exhibited in the Feudal Ages, from which they 
might be imbued with the spirit of romance and chivalry, ' ' and 
thus come in moral contact," as Arnold says, "with the robust 
faith and energetic passions of a race not yet sophisticated by civil- 
ization ; from the contemplation of whose life and manners, as 
these had caught beauty from the study of the ancients, they 
trusted that they also might catch inspiration, and wake up in 
themselves the great original forces of the human mind." 

Apart from these, however, stands Sir Walter Scott, being the 
first to revive romantic poetry solely for its own sake. As in 
some enchanted castle or old baronial hall, his knights and ladies 
and squires and pages after having remained spell-bound, fixed 
and immovable in their respective attitudes and picturesque attire, 
asleep for several centuries, or, at any rate, during the whole 
classical period, by the simple touch of his magic wand are started 
into life again, and resume with their wonted alacrity their sev- 
eral employments, after the same characteristic fashion in which 
they had been long since suspended, seemingly without any 
apprehension on their part of their Mediaeval times having forever 
passed away: and themselves rendered strange and antiquated from 
the long intervening lapse of succeeding ages. 

Just where Chaucer in The Rime of Sire Thopas breaks off, 
being interrupted by mine offended host of the Tabard, "whose 
eres, ' ' he said, ' ' were aken of his drafty speche and rime dogerel, ' ' 
Sir Walter Scott in the- Lay of the Last Minstrel resumes the 
strain, as it were, in the same spirited style and flowing rhythm, 
though nearly four hundred years had intervened. Thus: 



INTRODUCTORY LECTURE XV 

Nine and twenty knights of fame 

Hung their shields in Branksome hall ; 
Nine and twenty squires of name 

Brought them their steeds from bower to stall ; 
Nine and twenty yeomen tall 
Waited, duteous on them all ; 
They were all knights of metal true 
Kinsmen to the bold Buccleuh. 

Ten of them were sheathed in steel, 
With belted sword and spur on heel ; 
They quitted not their harness bright, 
Neither by day nor yet by night : 

They lay down to rest 

With corselet laced, 
Pillowed on buckler cold and hard, 

They carved at the meal 

With gloves of steel, 
And they drank the red wine through the helmet barred. 

Ten squires, ten yeomen, mail-clad men. 
Waited the beck of the warders ten ; 
Thirty steeds both fleet and wight 
Stood saddled in stable day and night, 
Barbed with frontlet of steel, I trow, 
And with jedwood axe at saddle-bow : 
A hundred more fed free in stall ; 
Such was the custom of Branksome hall. 

In the Lady of the Lake, Scott's poetical style in this direction 
reaches its acme. Such poems, however, in which heroic subjects 
are treated after the manner of the old romances of chivalry, can- 
not properly.be classed as such, but are essentially the fruit of 
modern times and of modern ideas. In them are expressions, 
indeed, and half lines constantly occuring which have been trans- 
ferred from the older compositions ; but in the treatment of their 
subjects they are all too modern, and in their language too polished 
and refined generally to accord with those of Mediaeval times. 
The hands may be the hands of Esau, and the goodly raiment 
his, and the feel of the hairy skins assumed about the neck might 
almost persuade us that it was the elder brother, but ' ' the voice 
is the voice of Jacob." 

How well it was that the old legends concerning King Arthur 
and his knights of the Round Table, derived from a British source, 
so tempting for an epic, though often touched upon by intermediate 
poets, were yet never turned to that account by any, but were 
suffered to remain in the black-letter compilations of Sir Thomas 
Malory, undisturbed, till the days of Alfred Tennyson ! 



XVI INTRODUCTORY LECTURE 

The advanced language which this latter spoke, together with 
his countrymen and the more modern age in which he lived, were 
better suited for receiving them. Before his time the English 
tongue had become very much Latinized. Milton's blank verse 
is greatly affected, we know, by classic literature, but more by the 
Latin than the Greek. Not, therefore, would this have been the 
best kind of verse for a suitable poem founded on the Arthurian 
legends, which Milton had once meditated composing, ere he had 
fallen on that loftier theme, which he has so sublimely treated, 
more befitting his own time and higher aspirations. 

Tennyson was the better pleased with the Saxon side of our 
literature than he was with that made up of the Latin and Norman 
French ; and from his earliest years had given it the closest atten- 
tion. In it he was aware of the strength contained and the suscepti- 
bility of receiving a beauty and a refinement which had escaped 
the observation of earlier poets. In his poems many precious old 
Saxon words, which had unluckily long before fallen out from the 
language and become obsolete and forgotten, he revived. Besides 
this he had very much devoted himself, in his academical years, 
to the study of Greek authors in preference to the Latin ; and he 
was among the very first to observe that close affinity which exists 
between the simple strength of the Homeric Greek and that of the 
English in which Saxon words prevail: and with what effect the old 
Doric Idylls of Sicily can be translated into Saxon English. He 
had also, from his youth, been much taken with a love for the old 
Gothic legends of the Mediaeval times; and these he found were in 
the same full sympathy with the Saxon English as were the stories 
of the Greeks. In forming from these his idyll, however, he did 
not transport himself far back into the Feudal times and there take 
up the song or story, as did Sir Walter Scott, immediately where 
it had been broken off from the mouths of the old romancers; but 
recalling from the past to his own times the shadowy forms of the 
stalwart knights of the Round Table and of their fair, half- revealed 
mysterious ladies, he placed them, to be sure, on solid earth again, 
with a fresh English landscape around them and a balmy English 
atmosphere above, but all to be seen through a dim, Gothic sort 
of twilight, being mellowed over and beautified by the retained 
soft glamor from the distant past. 

To take a resume of the history of English literature as affected 
by Mediaeval times, we note first, to go no further back, that of 
the Romantic, Gothic era during Queen Elizabeth's reign, whose 



INTRODUCTORY LECTURE XV11 

forms were derived, indeed, from the literature of the great Italian 
period, being the Mediaeval continued but chastened and beauti- 
fied from the contemplation of the antique. Of which English 
era "the genius," as Mr. Stedham remarks, "was conglomerate 
of old and new, and the myths of many ages and countries, but 
still fancy-free, or subject only to a pretended science as crude 
and wanton as the fancy itself: whose imagination was excited by 
chivalrous codes of honor, brave achievement, and the recurrent 
chances and marvels of new discoveries." 

All along with this literature, however, we have commingled 
the Saxon or Puritanical element, growing stronger every day 
and constituting its substantial basis, derived, indeed, from 
Mediaeval times, having been received, however, first, not through 
France or Italy, but directly from the early Gothic times of good 
Old England herself. From the strict morality of which, com- 
bined with the Italian romantic element, her literature was for a 
long time being rendered still more beautiful and sublime ; but 
the Puritanical spirit having become too austere and vigorous in 
the end, and having acquired a little before and during the times 
of the Commonwealth supreme dominance abroad, all romance, 
or, at any rate, so much as was included in the drama with the 
most important of the Fine Arts, too, coming under the strict 
censure of the times, as being conducive to evil, was authorita- 
tively suppressed. 

At the Restoration when the cavaliers at court and in the higher 
places of society, having in a measure thrown off their natural 
moral restraints, from their utter dislike to the Puritans and to 
gratify their own easy dispositions, had assumed a gayer sort 
of life, they became, as we have seen, even more immoral than 
were ever the French themselves whom they sought to imitate ; as 
is best shown from any of their highly popular comedies at the 
time, as those of Wycherley, for instance, in whose plays, to note 
one immoral sample out of many, to catch the applause of the 
dissolute audience, the poor, cajoled and injured husband is always 
exhibited in the most ludicrous light, while the gay, intriguing 
gallant always comes off successful to the end and joyfully tri- 
umphant. 

In such loose comedies is nothing to be met with savoring in 

the least of the inculcated morality of the good old Mediaeval 

times and of the romance of Shakespeare; neither throughout 

the yet remaining portion of the classical period, in any poet is 

i* 



XV1U INTRODUCTORY LECTURE 

there anything to be met with thus savoring of the old ; in which 
latter period, as we have seen, all romance had been virtually pro- 
scribed and driven out in conformity to the strict rules laid down 
by Boileau in his L/Art Poetique and vigorously observed by all 
English writers as they had been adopted by the French. 

Then after the escape from these rules and in the revival of 
genuine taste and natural feeling, in the more modern period, 
especially displayed in Wordsworth, we have besides a resume 
of the style of the Mediaeval times in the romantic poems of Sir 
Walter Scott, and also in the Oriental tales of Lord Byron and in 
the Italia Rookh of Thomas Moore — these latter all imaginary and 
romantic, but derived from Eastern sources. The impassioned 
style of Scott and Byron were certainly best suited for reviving 
and setting forth to the best advantage the chivalrous exploits of 
the renowned knights and champions of Mediaeval times. But 
the romantic sentimentalism of Byron exhibited in all his poems, 
exalted into a passion, which for a while, derived from him, 
had been the dominant spirit in English verse, had now, ere the 
rule of Tennyson, passed away and been succeeded by the calm 
of reverie and introspective thought; conjoined with which in 
Tennyson's case was his delicate classicism, his cultivated taste 
for pure Anglo-Saxon and love for old English poetry. In his 
Arthurian Epic, then, we are never borne by him through any 
impassioned strains of his into the very bustle and turmoil of any 
of the chivalrous adventures of the redoubtable knights of the 
Round Table ; but are allowed at our own ease and convenience 
to contemplate these in his poem, as if taken from some old Gothic 
paintings, over whose descriptions, besides their own intrinsic 
interest, is cast a sort of melancholy shade and romantic beauty, 
as over some ivy-covered tower, derived from the long hallowing 
influence of intervening time. 

But now my task is done. It is no longer possible to pursue, 
unless through fancy or conjecture, the history of English poetry, 
as affected by Mediaeval times, any further. The present period 
in England is a transitional period. "Throughout the recent 
poetry of Great Britain," as a present American critic observes, 
' ' a new departure is indicated, and there are signs that the true 
Victorian period is at an end. Although a composite school, hav- 
ing derived its models from all preceding forms, the idyllic method, 
as represented by Tennyson, upon the whole, has prevailed, and 
has been more successful than any contemporary efforts in the 



INTRODUCTORY LECTURE XIX 

higher scale of song." The idyl is a picturesque rather than an 
imaginative form of art, and calls for no great amount of inven- 
tion. It invariably has the method of a busy, anxious age seek- 
ing rest rather than excitement ; but when this has been found and 
the age has been soothed and refreshed, it begins to wish for 
something more stirring and animated. Music to please must not 
always be soft and harmonious, but must have besides its breaks 
and discords ; and the most gently flowing river to be complete 
must have in the end its wild cascade or impetuous torrent. To 
meet the present wants and coming period, many minor rising 
poets in England have latterly been assuming many different kinds 
of verse, with more or less appreciation by the public. In the 
idyllic method Rossetti and William Morris, for instance, follow- 
ers of Tennyson, have tried, with fine effect, to unite the Pre- 
Raphaelite realism still more closely with the spirit of beauty and 
refined culture of the present; but, finally, all have agreed in 
attempting to infuse with more dramatic passion the over-cultured 
method of the day. "Even Tennyson in the mellow ripeness of 
his fame," as it is remarked by Mr. Stedham, "perceives that the 
mission of the idyllist is ended," and by his entering latterly on 
dramatic writing ' ' is extending to the latest movement his adhe- 
rence and practical aid." w. m. n. 



How charming is divine Philosophy ! 

Not harsh and crabbed as dull fools suppose, 

But musical as is Apollo's lute, 

And a perpetual feast of nectared sweets, 

Where no crude surfeit reigns. — Milton. 



CONTENTS 



Preface, v 

Introductory Lecture, vi 

PART I 

THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD 
Section. Page. 

i — The Christian Church, 1-4 

2 — The Feudal System, 1-4* 

3 — Chivalry, 4- 7 

4 — Castles, _ 7-8 

5— The Wager of Battle, . . . . ' 8-9 

6 — The Crusades, 1096-1270, 6-1 1 

7 — The Literature of the Middle Ages, 11-12 

8 — Barly French Poetry, 12-14 

9— Romance, 14-16 

10 — Romances of Chivalry, 16-18 

11 — French Literature, 18-20 

12 — Scholasticism, 20-22 

13 — Aristotle and Plato, 22-24 

14— Dante — 1268-132 1, 24-26 

15— Petrarch— 1304-1374, 26 

16— Boccaccio— 13 13-1-3 75,-- 26-28 

17 — Mediseval'Plays, , 28-27 

18 — Rhyme in Latin Verse, and Mediaeval Hymns, 29-49 

19— The Renaissance— 1453-1533, 49~52 

20 — The Renaissance in Italy, 52-54 

21 — The Development of the Renaissance, 54 

22— Ariosto— 1474— 1533, , 55 

23— Tasso— 1544-1595, 55-57 

24 — Italy during the Renaissance, 57~6o 

25 — Painting and the Renaissance, 60-69 

26 — The Catholic Counter-Reformation, 69-70 

27 — Spain 70-72 

PART II 

ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE 
Section. Page. 

28 — The European Races, 73 

29 — Britannia, = 73-74 

30 — The Roman Conquest, 74 

31 — The Introduction of Christianity, 74~75 

32 — The Angles and Saxons 75-76 



XX11 CONTENTS 

Section. Page. 

33— The Heptarchy in the Sixth Century, 77 

34— The Conversion of Northumbria, 77- 78 

35— The Conversion of the Kingdoms South of the Humber, . . . .78-79 

36 — The Conversion of the Anglo-Saxons, 79- 80 

37— Anglo-Saxon Literature, 80- 82 

38 — Anglo-Saxon War Songs, 82- 86 

39 — Caedmon— about 670, 86- 87 

40— Beda— 673-735, 87-89 

41— Alcuin— 735-804, 89-91 

42 — Alfred the Great — 848-901; and St. Dunstan — 924-988, 91- 93 

43 — Pure Anglo-Saxon, 93- 94 

44 — Anglo-Saxon and Norman-French Poetry, 94- 95 

45 — Interfusion of a Celtic Element, 95- 98 

46 — Decline of the Anglo-Saxon 98-100 

PART III 

ENGLISH LITERATURE 
Section. Page. 

47 — The Norman Conquest— 1066, 101-103 

48 — The Norman Kings, 103-106 

49 — The Anglo-Norman Period — 1066-1215, 106-110 

50— Modern English Poetry, no-ill 

51 — The Race of the Angevin Kings— 1 154-1273, 111-120 

52 — The Monastic Chronicles, 120-122 

53 — Geoffrey of Monmouth — 1100-1152, 122-123 

54— The Holy Graal, 123-124 

55— Arthurian Romances, 125-131 

56 — The Scandinavians, 131-134 

57— Robin Hood, . . ., - . . . . 134-136 

58 — Transition English, 136-137 

59— John Gower — 1320-1408, 137-138 

60 — William Langley — 1332-1400, 138-139 

61 — John Wickliffe — 1324-1384, 139-140 

62— Pastoral, the Song and the Ballad, 141-142 

63— Old English Ballads, H 2 ~H3 

64 — Metrical Romances, ... 143-144 

65 — Geoffrey Chaucer — 1328-1400, 144-145 

66 — Chaucer's Court of Love, 146-147 

67 — The Legend of Good Women, 147-248 

68 — Chaucer's Love of Nature, . 148-150 

69— Revival of English Literature, 151-152 

70 — Celtic Element in English Literature, 152-155 

71— Ballads, . . 155-158 

72 — Occleve and Lydgate, 158-162 

73 — Decline of Literature in the Eighteenth Century, 159-164 

74— The Black Death, 162-167 

75 — Allegorical Poetry, 163-168 

76 — The Fabliaux, 165-167 

77 — The Romances of Chivalry, .... 167-168 



CONTENTS XX111 

Section. Page. 

78— English Castles, l6 8 

79— The Moralities, l6 9 

80— The New Learning in England— 1485-1509 170 

81— Sir Thomas More— 1478-1535, 1 71-177 

82— The Tudors— 1485-1603, *77 

83— Catharine of Aragon— 1485-1536, . 177-179 

84 — Cardinal Wolsey — 1471-1530, 179-181 

85— The Divorce and Wolsey's Fall, ...... ........ 181-186 

86— Martin Luther— 1483-1546, 186-189 

87— William Tyndale— 1484-1536, 189-192 

88— English Translations of the Bible, . 190-191 

89— Archbishop Cranmer — 1489-1566, 191-192 

90 — Thomas Cromwell — 1485-1540, 192-198 

91 — Edward the Sixth — 1537-1547, I 9 8 

92— Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey— 151 7~ I 547» 198-199 

93— The Catholic Reaction, ..... 199-205 

94— Rowland Taylor, 205-207 

95— The British Parliament ■ 207-208 

96— Oueen Elizabeth— 1533-1603, 208-212 

97— The Elizabethan Era— 1559-1603, 212-218 

98 — Edmund Spenser — 1552-1599, 218 

99— The Pastoral, 219-224 

100— Spenser's Fairy Queen, ' 224-226 

101 —His Romantism and Classicism, . . 226-227 

102— His Sense of Beauty • • 227-228 

103 — His Smaller Poems, 228 

104— The English Drama, 228-234 

105 — Shakespeare's Predecessors, . . • 234-235 

106 -William Shakespeare— 1564-16 16, 235-238 

107— His Style and Influence, 238-239 

108— His Method of Construction, 239 

109— His Character, . . .' 239-240 

no — Forms of the Later Elizabethan Drama, 240 

in— The Later Elizabethan Drama, • - 241-244 

112— It Maintains Its Level, 244-245 

113 — Puritanism and the Drama, , 245-247 

114 — Songs from the Dramatists, 2 47 _2 49 

115— English Poetical. Satire, 249-250 

116 — Psalms and Spiritual Songs, 250-254 

117— Elizabethan Prose, 254-256 

118— The Metaphysical Poets, , 256-257 

119— Lyric Poetry, 257-262 

Thomas Carew — 1598-1639. 

Robert Herrick — 1591-1674. 

Sir John Suckling— 1 608- 1 642 . 

Richard Lovelace — 16 18-1658. 

120— Richard Hooker — 1553-1600, ... .... 263-265 

121 — Sir Walter Raleigh — 1552-1618, 266 

122— Sir Philip Sidney— 1554-1586, 266-269 



XXIV CONTENTS 

Section. Page. 

123— Francis Bacon— 1562-1626, 270-273 

124 — John Donne — 1573-1631, . 273-274 

125 — Benjamin Jonson — 1574-1637, 274-276 

126 — John Milton — 1608-1674, 276-279 

127 — Abraham Cowley — 1618-1674, . 279-281 

128 — John Bunyan — 1628-1688, ... . . 281 

129 — The Pilgrim's Progress, 281-283 

130 — Kings of England — 1603-1895, 283 

131 — The Puritan Age — 1640- 1660, , 283-285 

132 — The Transition Period — 1661-1702, 285-289 

133 — Inferiority of the Diction, . 289-290* 

134 — Helpful Agencies of This Bra, 290-292 

135 — Leading Minds, ......... 292-293 

136 — John Dryden — 1631-1700, 293-296 

137 — The Modern Spirit — 1650-1700, . .... 296-299 

138— Alexander Pope — 1688-1744, 299-301 

139 — The Classical Age — 1700-1745, 301-302 

140 — The Eighteenth Century Literature, 302-311 

141 — Pathos, ... 311-319 

142— The Supernatural, 3*9-3 2 3 

343 — Agnostic Morality. 323-324 

PART IV 

CELTIC AND SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
Section. Page, 

144— The Kelts, 324-329 

145— Celtic Poetry, 329~334 

146— Ballad Literature, 334~336> 

147 — Old Scottish Ballads, 336-343 

148 — The Scottish Dialect, 343-350 

149 — The Earlier Bards of the Lowlands, 350-352 

150— The Poets of the Highlands, -352-355 

151 — Thomas Campbell — 1774-1844, 356-357 

152 — Thomas Moore — 1779-1852, 357-361 

153 — Celtic Wit and Humor, . . 361-363 

154 — The Lowlands of Scotland, 363-365 

155 — The Cameronians, 365-368 

156— Old Mortality, ' 368 

157 — Robert Burns— 1 750-1 796, 368-370 

158— Walter Scott— 1771-1832. 370-375 

PART V 

SOME MODERN AUTHORS 
Section. Page. 

159 — Sir William Jones— 1 746-1 793, 376-378 

160 — William Cowper—i 731 -1800, 378-381 

161— Samuel Taylor Coleridge — 1772-1834, 381-388 

162 — William Wordsworth — 1770-1850, .............. 388-398 



CONTENTS XXV 

Section. Page. 

163 — Robert Southey — 1774-1843, 398-400 

164 — George Noel Gordon Byron — 1 784-1 824, 400-406 

165 — Percy Bysshe Shelley — 1 792-1822, 408-409 

166 — Washington Irving — 1783-1859, 409-410 

167 — Thomas Carlyle — 1795-1881, 410-413 

168— John Keats— 1 795-1 82 1, 413 

169— William Cullen Bryant — 1794-1878, 414 

170 — Ralph Waldo Emerson — 1803-188 2, 415 

171 — John Greenleaf Whittier — 1807-1892, 415-417 

172 — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow — 1807-1882, 417-418 

173— Charles Lamb— 1775-1834, 419-421 

174 — Thomas Babington Macaulay — 1800-1859, 421-423 

175 — William Makepeace Thackeray — 1811-1863, 423-424 

176 — Charles Dickens — 1812-1870, 424-425 

177 — Matthew Arnold — 1822-1888, 425-427 

178 — John Ruskin — 1819- 427-428 

179 — Alfred Tennyson — 1809-1892, 428-432 

180 — Robert Browning — 1812-1889. 432-436 

PART VI 

SELECTIONS FROM PROFESSOR NEVIN'S WRITINGS 
Section. Page. 

181 — On National Taste, 437-451 

182 — Colloquy, No. 1 — The Farmer's Mistake, 452-459 

183 — Colloquy, No 2 — Captain Woodberry, 459-465 

184— When These Two Halls Were New, 467-469 

185 — A Sketch of Professor Nevin's Life — 1806-1892, 469-479 

186 — And a Litany 469 



At the Commencement of Franklin and Marshall College in 
June, 1892, the Alumni Association of Franklin and Marshall 
College appointed a committee, consisting of the Hon. W. U. 
Hensel, Walter M. Franklin, Esq., and Dr. Theodore Appel, to 
prepare the lectures of Professor Nevin for publication. At the 
same meeting a committee, consisting of the Rev. Dr. Cyrus 
Cort, the Rev. C. U. Heilman and the Rev. D. W. Gerhard, was 
appointed to solicit subscribers for the new volume. These com- 
mittees endeavored to discharge their duty according to the best 
of their ability. 



AN ERRATUM. 
The careful, critical reader will probably notice here and there an error in 
this volume. An important one occurs on page 77, which we wish here to 
point out. St. Columba is there identified with St. Columbanus. It is well 
known that they were different persons The former was an Irish missionary 
in Scotland, the latter an Irish missionary in France, Germany, Switzerland 
and Italy. Both were Apostolic men. — Editor. 



LECTURES ON THE HISTORY 



— OF — 



English Literature 



EXCERPTS 



They say that Niobe, whilst still living, was changed into a stone on the 
tomb of her children. But whosoever believes that a man grew out of a stone, 
or a stone out of a man, is a simpleton. The underlying truth of the saying 
is this : Niobe, when her children had died, having made for herself an image 
of stone, placed it upon the tomb of her children where we have seen her 
just as she is said to have looked when alive. — Hierocles. 

Sin autem requirit, quae causa nos impulcrit, ut hsec sero litteris mandare- 
mus, nihil est quod expedire tam facile possumus, nam putavi, magni existi- 
mans interesse ad decus et ad laudem civitatis, res tam graves tamque prae- 
claras L,atinis etiam litteris contineri. — Cicero, De Natura Deorum. 

La poesie est le souvenir et le pressentiment des choses ; ce qu'elle celebre 
n'est pas encore mort, ce qu'elle chante existe deja. 

— Lamartine, Giron dins. 

Heiug achten wir die Geister, 

Aber Namen sind uns Dunst, 

Wiirdig ehren wir die Meister, 

Aber frei ist uns die Kunst. — Uhland, Gedichte. 

Come '1 fuoco muovesi in altura 

Fer la sua forma ch'e nota a salire 

L,a dove piu in sua materia dura ; 
Cosi l'animo preso entra in disire, 

Ch'e moto spiritale, e mai non posa 

Fin che la cosa amata il fa gioire. 

— Dante, Pur gator io. 

The testimony of many heathen authors, who were strangers to the Jewish 
writers, goes to show that the most ancient tradition among all nations is 
exactly agreeable to the relation of Moses. — Clarke's Grotius. 



THE HISTORY 



OF 



English Literature 



PART I 
THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD 



§ 1 . The Church. 

FROM the fifth to the sixteenth century Christianity exercised 
a mighty influence over civilization. While secular disor- 
ganization everywhere prevailed, the Church was an organized 
society, thus presenting to the world an example of social order 
and regularity; while secular ignorance was universal, she pre- 
served a faint but glimmering ray of learning. Though opposed 
to secular learning and the study of the classics, she be- 
came the means of preserving and multiplying classical manu- 
scripts. In short, the Church was the bridge across the Dark 
Ages, between ancient and modern literature. Her impression 
on early European literature is manifest, and in its study the 
power exerted by religion over the human mind in those remote 
times must be taken into consideration. 

§ 2. The Feudal System. 

When nations became fixed and wandering life had ceased, 
social organization was necessary. Here the German element 
prevailed, and Feudalism, a Teutonic institution, was the first 
system to take possession of European society. To secure their 
new possessions and to reward their followers, the Barbarian 
chiefs allotted lands to their military leaders, who in turn dealt 
them out in smaller shares to those beneath them in rank. The 
condition annexed to these holdings was that the receiver should 



2 THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD 

do faithful service, when called upon, to him by whom they were 
given; while, on the other hand, the lords were pledged to pro- 
tect the possessions thus bestowed. Hence, with these obliga- 
tions of service and protection, were circulated the finer ideas of 
duty and affection. From the eleventh to the thirteenth century 
this social system was universally adopted, and in it modern civil- 
ization had its birth. Wherever Barbarism ceased, Feudalism was 
established. Though pernicious in many respects, it excited a 
powerful and favorable influence over the intellectual growth of 
the nations. The earliest monuments of modern literature are 
traced back to feudal times. 

The essential constituent of the Estate, called a Feud or Fief, 
was that it was not an estate of absolute ownership. The person 
to whom it was granted did not become an owner, but only a 
tenant or a holder. There is no proof that fiefs were originally 
resumable at pleasure, though it is often so asserted. They 
were granted on condition of certain services, the neglect of 
which would cause a forfeiture of them to the grantor or his 
heirs. It may be that the grant was always originally deter- 
mined by the death of the grantee, who had only a life-estate, 
and that the grant was then made anew. The System of Feudal- 
ism comprised the notion of a tenant, who owed services for his 
land, and that of a vassal, which denoted a personal relation to 
the lord. It appears certain that the original vassali or vast 
were merely noblemen, who attached themselves to the Court and 
to attendance upon the Prince, without holding any landed 
estate or beneficium by royal grant. 

If the vassal was at first merely an attendant upon his lord, 
nothing could be more natural than that, when the lord came to 
have land to give away, he should most frequently bestow it upon 
his vassals, both as a reward for their past service and as a bond 
by which he might secure their future services. The vassal was 
conveniently rewarded by a fief, that is, by a loan, the profits 
of which were left to him as entirely as if he had obtained the 
ownership of the land ; but the precarious ownership of which, at 
the same time, kept him bound to his lord on the same depend- 
ence as before. 

When fiefs for life became established, the next step would be 
for the eldest son usually to succeed his father. His right so to 
succeed would need to be established by usage. At a later stage, 
fiefs became descendible to the collateral as well as in a direct 



THE FEUDAL SYSTEM 3 

line. And at a still later day, they became inheritable to females 
as well as males. Through the whole of this progressive develop- 
ment of the system, however, the original nature of the fief was 
not forgotten. The ultimate property was still held to be in the 
lord ; and that fact was very distinctly signified, not only in the 
expressive language of forms and symbols, but by the duties of 
the tenants. Even after fiefs became descendible to heirs in the 
most comprehensive sense and by the most fixed rules, every new 
occupant of the estate had to make solemn acknowledgment of 
his vassalage, and thus to obtain, as it were, a renewal of the 
grant from the lord. He became bound to discharge all services 
and other duties as fully as the first grantee had been. In certain 
circumstances, as, for example, if the tenant committed treason 
or felony, or if he left no heir, the estate would still return by 
forfeiture or escheat to the lord as its original owner. 

Originally, fiefs were granted only by sovereign princes ; but, 
in the course of time, tenants began to exercise the power of 
lords by the practice of what was called subinfeudation, that is, by 
the alienation of portions of their fiefs to other parties, who were 
placed in the same or similar relation to them as that in which 
they stood to the prince. The vassal of the prince became the 
lord over other vassals ; in this latter capacity he was called a 
mesne, that is, an intermediate lord : he was a vassal and a lord 
at the same time. In the same manner the vassal of a mesne lord 
might become also the lord of other arren ting vassals, as those 
vassals that held of a mesne were designated. 

After the conquest of England by the Normans, the dominium 
directum, or property of all land in the kingdom, was considered 
as vested in the crown. ' 'All the lands and tenements in England, ' ' 
says Coke, " are holden immediately by the King, for in the law 
of England we have not properly allodium," as, in all other 
continental provinces of the Roman Empire, which were conquered 
and occupied by Germanic nations was the case ; many lands 
being held in these from the first, not as fiefs, but as allodia, in 
full and entire membership. The holder of such an estate, having 
no lord, was, of course, free from all the duties which were inci- 
dental to the vassalage of the holder of a fief. He was also, 
however, without the powerful protection which the latter enjoyed 
from his lord. After the conquest of England, then, by the 
Normans, this dominium directum from the crown may be re- 
garded as the first respect in which the System of Feudalism estab- 



4 THE MKDI^V^L PERIOD 

lished in England differed from that of France and other conti- 
nental countries. The Conquerors, for instance, introduced here 
the practice, unknown on the Continent, of compelling the arrent- 
ing vassals as well as the immediate tenants of the king to take the 
oath of fealty to themselves. In other countries the vassal only 
swore fealty to his immediate lord ; in England, if he held of a 
mesne lord, he took two oaths, one to his lord and another to his 
lord's lord. Military service, or knight's service, as it was called 
in England, though it was the usual, was by no means the neces- 
sary or uniform condition on which fiefs were granted. Any other 
honorable condition might be imposed, which distinctly recognized 
the dominium directum of the lord. 

§ 3. Chivalry. 

Chivalry or Knighthood was a military institution, prompted 
by an enthusiastic benevolence, combined with ceremonies, the 
avowed purpose of which was to protect the weak and to defend the 
right. It appears to have had its origin in the military distinction 
by which certain feudal tenants were bound to serve on horseback, 
equipped with a coat of mail. Hence the word chivalry is derived 
from the French cheval, a horse. He who thus fought, and had 
been thus invested with the helmet, shield and spear in a solemn 
manner, wanted nothing more to render him a Knight. From the 
advantages of the mounted over the ordinary combatant, probably 
arose that far-famed valor and keen sense for renown, which ulti- 
mately became the essential qualities of a knight's character. 

Chivalry took a systematic shape as the adventurous service of 
God and womankind. The Crusades were its first outgrowth in 
action, and love-poetry its first symmetrical expression in Art. 
Valor was exerted to protect the innocent from violence, to succor 
the distressed, to release captured beauty from embattled walls. 
The knight, fond dreamer, when the dream forever fled, turned him 
to far lands and conflicts, to merit and win the fair adored, whose 
point of honor was to be chaste and inaccessible. But loving 
Chivalry for its nobleness, let us not be blind to its folly and 
excess. To a winter day it gave the tint of amethyst: over the 
darkness it threw a cheerful light. The incentives, exalted and 
sublime as they were, too often in this unripe civilization made 
its possessors implacable and infuriate. The feudal hero did less 
than he imagined. His profession of courtesy and courage was 



CHIVALRY 



not unfrequently the brilliant disguise that concealed tyrrany and 
rapine. With a reduction and softening down of a tongh and law- 
less period, it often rose to fanaticism or sank into gross impurities. 



.Chivalry has been represented as a great institution, invented 
in the eleventh century for a grand moral purpose — that of strug- 
gling against the deplorable condition of society at that period ; 
of protecting the weak against the strong ; and of redressing 
individual injuries. It, however, arose much more simply, more 
naturally and more silently. It took its rise in the feudal man- 
sions, without any set purpose beyond that of declaring : first, 
the admission of the young man to the rank and occupation of the 
warrior ; and secondly, his acknowledging the tie which bound him 
to his feudal superior, his lord, who conferred upon him the arms 
of knighthood. 

In the course of its development, when once the feudal society 
had acquired some degree of stability and self-confidence, religion 
and imagination, poetry and the Church laid hold of it, and used it, 
as a powerful means of obtaining the objects they had in view of 
meeting the moral wants, which it was their business to provide for. 
So early as the ninth century we find religious ceremonies asso- 
ciated with the Germanic practices on these occasions, and in the 
twelfth, the ceremonies were numerous and solemn. 

The young aspirant to knighthood had to bathe as a symbol of 
cleansing, and on coming out of the bath he was invested with a 
white tunic as a symbol of purity, a red robe emblematic of the 
blood he was to shed for the faith, and a black doublet as a token 
of his mortality. He had to fast twenty-four hours and to pass 
the night in prayer, in some church, either alone or with priests ; 
he took the sacrament ; heard mass and usually a sermon on the 
duties of a chevalier ; after which the sword of knighthood was 
hung around his neck by the priest, accompanied with his bene- 
diction. After these religious ceremonies, the knights in attend- 
ance, or, sometimes the ladies, arrayed him in complete armor, 
except the helmet ; he was then dubbed by his lord, and received 
accolade, or blows with the sword on the shoulders. Thus 
knighted the young man put on his helmet, mounted his horse 
within the church, brandished his lance and flourished his sword, 
to show his readiness to do battle for the faith, and then left the 
church to exhibit himself to the populace. 



6 THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD 

It is easy to recognize in all this the influence of the priesthood, 
studious to associate religion with every circumstance of solemnity 
in a warrior's life. Whatever evils resulted from the unscrupulous 
and improvident use, which the Roman Church made of the indi- 
rect influence over the power of the sword, she undeniably made 
use of the chivalric institutions, which Feudalism had brought 
forth, in laboring to introduce internal peace into society, and a 
stricter and more comprehensive morality into individual conduct. 

In proportion as this endeavor succeeded, Chivalry became the 
ideal standard of the inspiration of men, and the source of their 
most exalted pleasures. Poetry then laid hold on Chivalry, as 
religion had done. As early as the eleventh century the chival- 
rous ceremonies, duties and adventures, formed the mine to which 
the poets resorted for the means of charming the people, of at 
once gratifying and stimulating the cravings of the imagination — 
that thirst for incidents more varied and more stirring, for emo- 
tions purer and more elevated than real life affords. The poetical 
remains, that have descended to us from that age, show that the 
poet impressed upon the chevalier the fulfilment of the same 
duties , and the practice of the same virtues as were inculcated 
more solemnly by the priest. 

It is an oft repeated observation that all this was mere 
poetry, a fine chimera, bearing no resemblance whatever to the 
reality. The period before us is, undoubtedly, one in which we 
find the greatest amount of crime and violence, one in which the 
public peace was most incessantly disturbed, and one in which the 
most dissolute manners prevailed. Yet it is undeniable that the 
chivalric morality and poetry exerted simultaneously with these 
disorders, with the barbarism, with all this deplorable social state, 
a salutary and happy influence, The moral conceptions of men 
rose far above the practice of their lives. Nor let it be thought, 
because those conceptions did not govern their actions ; because 
their practice so strongly belied their theory, that the influence 
of the theory was absolutely null. The habitual judgment of 
men upon human actions is not without its effect. For instance, 
at no period, perhaps, had the intercourse between the sexes been 
more licentious ; yet never was purity of manners more strongly 
enjoined or more feelingly described. Nor was it a theme for 
poetry alone. We find from a multitude of testimonies that the 
public thought in this particular was as the poet spoke : that the 
prevailing moral notions were pure and noble amidst all the rude- 
ness and licentious conduct of the times. 



CASTLES f 

This, then, was the grand moral characteristic of Chivalry, 
which entitles it to an important place in the history of modern 
civilization. If, on the other hand, we regard it, not in a moral 
but in a social point of view, not as an idea but as an institution, 
it merits but slight consideration ; for though it had a great and 
stirring part in the world's affairs, yet, as already shown, it did 
not constitute an actual, specific institution at all. It had, how- 
ever, given birth to the religious orders of the Templars, the 
Knights of St. John, and the Teutonic Knights ; and it was be- 
ginning to produce the courtly orders — those of garters and 
ribbons — the knighthood of mere rank and parade. It was des- 
tined to tincture yet a long while the manners, the language and 
the literature of European society. But the true Chivalry, that to 
which the name can be truthfully applied, flourished and fell with 
Feudalism, formally abolished in our own century. 

§ 4. Castles. 

Castles were unknown in England until the time of Edward the 
Confessor, the .predecessor of William the Conqueror, the reign of 
Harold intervening. Their design was received from Normandy. 
They belong essentially to the Feudal System, and are of French 
or Germanic origin. No feudal lord could ever feel himself fully 
established, and independent in his own domain, until he had 
erected for himself his feudal castle, to protect him from all out- 
ward assaults of any other feudal lord, or even of the king him- 
self. 

" The castle of a great feudatory," says Vernon Eee, " of the 
early Middle Ages, is like the miniature copy of some garrison 
town in barbarous countries. There is an enormous preponder- 
ance of men over women ; for only the chief in command, the 
over-lord and perhaps one or two of kinsmen or adjutants, are per- 
mitted the luxury of a wife ; the rest of the gentlemen are sub- 
alterns, younger sons without means, youths sent to learn their 
military duty and the ways of the world ; a whole pack of men 
without wives, without homes, and usually without fortune. 

1 ' High above all this deferential male crowd moves the Lady of 
the Castle, high-born, proud, having brought her husband a dower 
of fiefs, often equal to his own, and of vassals devoted to her race. 
About her she has no equals ; her daughters, scarcely out of the 
nurse's hand, are given away in marriage; and her companions, 



8 THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD 

if companions they may be called, are the waiting ladies, poor 
gentlewomen, situated between the maid of honor and the lady's 
maid. Round this lady — the stately, proud lady, perpetually 
described by mediaeval poets — nutters the swarm of young men 
all day long in her path, serving her at meals, guarding her 
apartment, nay, as pages, admitted even into her most secret 
chamber ; servants, lacqueys, and yet at the same time men of 
good birth and high breeding, good at the sword and at the lute, 
bound to amuse this high-born woman, fading away in the 
monotony of feudal life, with few books to read or unable to 
read ; and far above all the household concerns, which devolve on 
the butler, the cellarer, the steward, the gentleman honorably 
employed as a servant. To them, these young men, with few or 
no women of their own age with whom to associate, and abso- 
lutely no unmarried girls who could be a desirable match, the 
Lady of the Castle speedily becomes a goddess, the impersonifica- 
tion at once of that feudal superiority before which they bow, or 
of that social perfection, which they are commanded to seek, and 
of that womankind of which the castle had so few examples." 

§ 5. The Wager of Battle. 

The Wager of Battle is essentially a warlike institution. It 
may be called irrational or impious, but it was no risking of 
human life in mere sport or frivolity. Strange as such means of 
arriving at the truth may seem to us, it was a grave proceeding, 
the object of which was to come to the truth. When there was 
no convincing evidence in the law at any judicial trial, the Wager 
of Battle was allowed. It was a direct judgment of God, who, 
as men deemed, would give victory in the strife to the righteous 
cause. But once bring in the chivalrous spirit, once set men to 
fight and risk their lives, not to decide any issue of truth or right 
but for mere sport, mere display, mere excitement, and it becomes 
the Tourname?it. The public practice of military exercise can 
hardly fail to be the usage of any people among whom every man 
may be called upon to bear arms ; but mere military exercise, 
which need not involve any greater danger than bodily exercise 
of any other kind, is something utterly different from the wanton 
risking of life, which is the essence of the tournament. The 
tournament appears in England as a novelty of the twelfth cen- 
tury, a French device, unknown to England , where it was spoken 



THE CRUSADES 9 

of by grave writers of that age with the horror it deserved. 
Neither of the great Henrys allowed any such doings in his days. 
They began only under the anarchy of Stephen ; they began 
again in the days of the Knight-errant Richard. The Church 
denounced them in vain. The ordeal of water and of hot iron, 
which was an old English institution and not French, for the 
deciding of causes, was in like sort forbidden by the Church ; and 
the ban took effect, because the institution was the fruit of the 
age: it was the embodiment of Chivalry. It survived in the 
statute-book long after it had been forgotten in practice, till it 
was a thing of the past. 

§ 6. The Crusades. 

Under this name are designated the religious wars carried on 
for two centuries between the Christians and the Mohammedans. 
At first the Christians demanded only a free pilgrimage to the 
Holy Sepulchre, but afterwards the contest was for the possession 
of Jerusalem ; and the wars had an important influence on the 
civilization of Europe. As long as the Caliphs of Bagdad, and 
after them the Fatimites of Egypt, possessed Egypt, the Chris- 
tians were not checked in the exercises of the religious practice 
of visiting the Holy Sepulchre ; but when the Turks had effected 
the conquest of Palestine, the hospitality of the Arabs gave way 
to the brutality of the new possessors ; and the Christians were 
subjected to so many vexations that the whole of Europe re- 
echoed with the complaints of the pilgrims. 

It was in the year 1095 that Pope Urban II decreed the first 
Crusade — first at the Council at Piacenza in March, afterwards at 
that of Clermont in Auvergne in November. Supported by the 
ambassador of the Emperor of Constantinople, and numerous 
powerful lords, he proclaimed the Sacred War, and appointed the 
fifteenth of August, 1096, the day of the Assumption, for the 
departure of the army. The minds of the Christian warriors had 
been previously excited by the preaching of Peter of Amiens, the 
Hermit, and by the loud complaints of the Patriarch who pro- 
vided him with letters of credit from the Pope ; he travelled through 
Europe, and filled all classes of society with enthusiasm for the 
holy warfare. Those who determined to set out for the Holy 
Land wore on their breasts the figure of a Red Cross, and hence 
the name of the Crusaders. The first Crusade ended with the 



10 THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD 

capture of Jerusalem in 1099, and the election of Godfrey of 
Bouillon to be its king ; and the kingdom was transmitted to his 
successors until 11 87 under Guy of Lusignan, when Saladin put 
an end to the Christian domination. The second Crusade was led 
by Louis of France, and Conrad Emperor of Germany. It began 
in 1 147, consisted of 140,000 armed knights and near one million 
of foot-soldiers, but it ended in a complete failure in 1149, 
chiefly through the opposition and intrigues of Manuel Comnenus, 
the Emperor of the East. The third Crusade, in 1189, numbered 
among the chief leaders the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, 
Philip Augustus, king of France, and Richard Cceur de Lion, 
king of England. Dissensions among the leaders, and particu- 
larly between Richard and Philip, notwithstanding some brilliant 
successes, led to the abandonment of the enterprise in 1192. The 
fourth Crusade, of which the chief promoters were the Venetians, 
principally occupied its force in conquering Constantinople, in 
order to restore Alexius, the son of the Emperor Isaac Angelos ; 
but after elevating and deposing several emperors, the imperial 
crown was placed on the head of Baldwin of Flanders in 1204. 
Frederick II Emperor of Germany, undertook the fifth Crusade 
in 1227, and he succeeded in obtaining possession of Jerusalem 
by treaty with Malek Kamel, Sultan of Egypt ; he then returned 
home, and Jerusalem was retaken by the Turks in 1244. St. 
Louis, Louis IX of France, conducted the sixth Crusade in 1249. 
He took Damietta and advanced towards Cairo, but was sur- 
rounded by the troops of the Sultan, and taken prisoner with the 
remains of his army, which had been wasted by battle, sickness 
and fatigue. Louis was afterwards ransomed, and in 1270 under- 
took another Crusade, but died on the shores of Africa. The 
seventh and last Crusade was undertaken by Edward I of Eng- 
land, but he effected nothing permanent, and soon returned home. 
Before the close of the thirteenth century, therefore, the whole of 
Palestine and Syria became a possession of the Sultans of Egypt, 
and obeyed the laws of Mohammed. 

Although the Crusades sacrificed the lives of several millions 
of Christians, among whom were many women and children ; 
although they were one of the causes which contributed to give 
the popes such an overwhelming power in Europe ; and although 
they were instrumental in bringing about the wars of persecution 
which afflicted Europe, in weakening the power of the Eastern 
princes and rendering them unable to withstand the attacks of 



THE LITERATURE OF THE MIDDLE AGES 1 1 

the Mongols ; yet it cannot be denied that they were accompanied 
with many beneficial effects. Such, for instance, were the in- 
creased activity of political life in Europe : the breaking up of 
the Feudal System by the sale of estates to merchants in exchange 
for the money required by the nobles for their military accoutre- 
ments and provisions ; the increased wealth of the mercantile 
towns in Italy, which led to the revival of the Fine Arts and the 
Sciences in that country ; and, finally, in the diffusion of more 
liberal modes of thinking in matters of government and religion, 
occasioned by the intercourse of the Eastern and Western nations. 
The great influence of the Crusades in the extension of commerce 
has been pointed out by Heeren in his Essay on the ' ' Influence of 
the Crusades." 

§ 7 . The Literature of the Middle Ages. 

The early French language was divided into two branches, 
which took their names from their respective modes of expressing 
the word yes. The dialect of Southern France, called Langue 
d'oe, was characterized by its close resemblance to Latin ; while 
in Northern France the Langue (Toil partook more of the Ger- 
manic nation. During the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth cen- 
turies the Troubadours of the South and the Trouveres of the 
North poured forth the gay and brilliant verses which constitute 
the beginnings of French literature. The former sang chiefly 
of love and exhibited little imagination, emotion or learning in. 
their works ; but the latter celebrated the heroic and chivalrous 
deeds of kings and knights, and displayed considerable epic 
power. Their songs chiefly centered about the names of Charle- 
magne, King Arthur and Alexander. They were followed by 
poems of an allegorical and satirical nature, many of which were 
popular and are well known at the present day — such as ' ' Roman 
de Renard " and " Roman de la Rose." The former is the story 
of Reynard the Fox, the " Reinecke Fuchs " of Germany; the 
latter is one of the most celebrated productions of the Middle 
Ages and was translated into English by Chaucer. 

Of the troubadour poetry of Southern France an essential char- 
acter is its being addressed rather to the fancy than to the hearts 
of its hearers. The love which inspired the bosom of the Trouba- 
dour partook of the same character as the poetry which emanated 
from its existence. It was essentially a poetical passion, that is, 
a passion indulged in less from the operation of natural feeling 



12 THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD 

than from the advantages it presented in its poetical uses. The 
poet selected for the object of his songs the lady whom he deemed 
most worthy of that honor — sometimes the daughter, more fre- 
quently the wife of the noble under whose roof he resided . Inferior- 
ity of condition on the side of the poet was no bar to a requital of 
his affection ; for his genius and talent might still entitle him to 
take rank with the highest. The marriage vow, on the part of the 
lady, was no barrier to the advances of the poet, for a serious and 
earnest passion rarely existed between the parties. But, accord- 
ing to the usages of the times, every noble beauty must muster 
in her train some admiring poet — every bard was obliged to select 
some. fair object of devotion, whom he might enshrine in his 
verses and glorify before the world ; and both parties were well 
content to dignify the cold-blooded relation, in which they stood 
to each other, by the hallowed name of love. That the head, and 
not the heart, was most frequently the source of this simulated 
affection is shown by the fact that we find, in cases where the 
chosen fair one was living in single blessedness, the poetical woo- 
ings of her imaginative adorer rarely terminated in the prose of 
marriage. There were instances, certainly, of such events result- 
ing from these poetical connections, but they were few ; not so 
those in which the married lady, who woke the poet's lyre, broke 
the silken bonds of matrimony, and made returns somewhat more 
than Platonic to the herald of her charms . The connection between 
the parties frequently degenerated into intrigue, but rarely ele- 
vated itself into a noble and virtuous attachment. 

The Troubadours of the South as well as the Trouveres of the 
North had their Courts of Love commencing as far back as the 
twelfth century, and continuing as late as the fourteenth. At this 
court ladies of high degree presided. There was the Court of 
Ermengarde, Viscountess of Narbonne, there was the Court of 
Queen Eleonor, and many others. Before them questions of 
love and gallantry were debated, and by them judgment was pro- 
nounced. All these questions were decided in conformity with 
the Code of Love, of which there were some curious articles. 

§ 8. Early French Poetry. 

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, that seed-time of all 
modern languages and literature, the poetry of France had a 
clear predominance in Europe. Of the two divisions of that 
poetry, its productions in the Langue d'oil and its productions in 



EARLY FRENCH POETRY 13 

the Langue d'oc, the poetry of the latter, among the Troubadours 
of Southern France, is of importance because of its effect on 
Italian literature ; but the predominance of French poetry in 
Europe, during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, is due to the 
language of I^angue d'oil, the poetry of Northern France and of 
the tongue which is now the French language. In the twelfth 
century the bloom of this romance was earlier and stronger in 
England at the court of the Anglo-Norman kings than in France 
itself. But it was a bloom of French poetry, and as the native 
English had formed itself, so it formed itself out of this. The 
Romance poems, which took possession of the heart and imagina- 
tion of Europe during this period, are French. Themes were 
supplied from all quarters, but the romance setting, which was so 
common to them all, and which gained the ear of Europe, was 
French. This constituted for the French poetry, literature and 
language, at the height of the Middle Ages, an unchallenged 
predominance. The Italian Brunetto Latini, the master of 
Dante, wrote his Treasure in French, "because," as he says, 
■ ' this language is more delectable and more common in every 
nation." In the same century, the thirteenth, the French ro- 
mance writer, Christian of Troyes, formulates the claims of France, 
his native country, in chivalry and letters as follows : 

' ' Now by this book you will learn that first Greece had the 
renown for chivalry and letters ; then chivalry and the primacy 
of letters passed to Rome, and now it is come to France. God 
grant that it may be kept there, and that it may please it so well 
that the honor which has come to make its stay in France may 
never depart hence!" Yet, it is now all gone, this French 
romance poetry ; it is only by means of the historic estimate that 
we can persuade ourselves now to think that any of it is of poet- 
ical iniportance. 

While the poetry of the Troubadours in the South of France 
was chiefly lyric and its chief inspiration was love ; that of the 
Trouveres among the Normans in the north of France, was mostly 
epic, with historical and romantic themes, written for the luxu- 
rious few, ambitious and astir with action, expressing and circu- 
lating the chivalrous sentiments of life, of love and loyalty. The 
central figures of their romantic themes were Charlemagne and 
his Peers, the Knights of the Round Table, the heroes of the 
Crusades and those of the Anglo -Danish cycle, the most famous 
of whom were Havelock, King Horn and Guy of Warwick. 



14 THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD 

Those of purely French origin were concentrated at last or gath- 
ered into the cycle of those concerning Charlemagne, and his 
paladins in their early crusades against the Moslems of Spain ; 
and those of Brittany and of British origin were concentrated at 
last in the cycle of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round 
Table, Charlemagne and his Peers, the heroes of the Crusades, 
and those of the Anglo-Danish cycle. 

§ 8. Romance. 

In the ninth century the Romano, or Romantic language made 
its first appearance in writing. For many centuries, however, it 
was only used to embody the tales and ballads of each country, in 
which the one or the other of each form of the speech was ver- 
nacular ; so that the word ' ' romance ' ' became finally appropri- 
ated to the compositions which were the staple literature of the 
Li7igua Roma?ia or Romance. 

Romance, in its widest sense, includes the entire literature of 
fiction, as well as the early narrations in which fact and legend 
were blended in historical form, before the simple minds of the 
people had acquired a clear conception of their distinctness. 
There are, however, certain ill-defined limitations in the analysis 
of fiction which enable us to assign distinct places to the legend, 
the ballad, the epic, the fable, the tale, the romance, and the 
novel. As usual in all the attempts at precise classification, we 
find that the lines of demarcation cannot be drawn with rigid 
exactness, and that many works may be referred to more than 
one division. 

Romance, as a distinct branch of the literature of fiction, 
belongs essentially to the Middle Ages and to Europe. The 
Romance of Chivalry, as it is called, prevailed during the four 
centuries of knighthood, and there can be little doubt that the 
institutions of Chivalry were considerably influenced by the 
works of the early romancers. The establishment of the Orders 
of St. John and the Temple was based upon an exalted concep- 
tion of duty and devotion, which the hard test of experience soon 
modified, and which would have perished utterly but for the 
embodiment of its ideal in the Round Table romances. The char- 
acters of Galahad and the original Perceval represent types of un- 
alterable perfections, and were, therefore, models which, although 
commanding reverence, failed to excite as deep an interest as 
did the second Perceval, Sir Lancelot, Sir Tristram and Sir 



ROMANCE 1 5 

Gawain. In these the noblest qualities were blemished by 
human frailties, and, as a necessary consequence, the knight 
miscarried a little below the summit of perfect achievement. 
Walter Map cannot be sufficiently eulogized for the tact and 
skill with which he drew the two first-named personages. Gala- 
had is brought upon the stage but a very short time and is then 
dismissed in a blaze of saintly glory, while Perceval, although 
adopted from the French writers from a purer knight of that 
name, is allowed a much larger space upon the canvas, at the 
cost of a few minor sins, which suffice to ensure his failure and 
to prove him to be a man. The other knights are brave and 
generous, self-sacrificing and devout ; but the indispensable virtue 
of chastity is absent from their lives, and they are foredoomed to 
misfortune. The perfect ideal, however, underlies the description 
of all their arts and motives, and the reader or hearer was never 
allowed to forget it amid the more powerful attractions of the 
story. 

A line of distinct hostility to the Church during the reign of 
Henry the Second (i 154- 1 189), says the historian Green, devel- 
oped itself from the first among the singers of romance. 

Romance had long before taken root in the Court of Henry the 
First, where, under the patronage of Queen Maud, the dreams of 
Arthur, so long cherished by the Celts of Brittany, and which 
had travelled in the train of the exile Rhys of Tewdwr, took shape 
in the history of the Britons by Geoffrey of Monmouth. Myth, 
legend, tradition, the classical pedantry of the day, Welsh hopes 
of future triumph over the Saxon, the memories of the Crusades 
and of the world dominion of Charles the Great, were mingled 
together by this daring fabulist in a work whose popularity 
became at once immense. Alfred of Beverly transferred Geoffrey's 
inventions into the region of sober history, while two Norman 
Trouveres, Gaimar and Wace, translated them into French verse. 
So complete was the credence which they obtained that Arthur's 
tomb in Glastonbury was visited by Henry the Second, who was 
the son of Matilda and Geoffrey the Handsome of Anjou, to 
whom, from his habit of wearing the common broom, the Planta 
Genestae in his helmet, had been given the title of Plantagenet ; 
while the child of his own son Geoffrey and Constance of 
Brittany received the name of the Celtic hero Prince Arthur of 
Brittany. 



16 THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD 

§ 10. jRomances of Chivalry. 

The Normans in the North of France were a Scandinavian 
tribe, with a changed nature ; Christianized, at least in a mediaeval 
sense, and civilized. The special quality of their genius was its 
suppleness. They intermarried with the French, borrowed the 
French language, adopted French customs, imitated French 
thought, and in a hundred and fifty years after their settlement 
in France, were so far civilized as to consider their kinsmen, 
the Saxons, unlettered and rude. They excelled these in refine- 
ment of manners, in taste, in. weapons and warlike enterprises, 
and in intellectual culture. 

While the poetry of the Troubadours in the South of France 
was chiefly lyric and its chief inspiration love, that of the Trou- 
veres among the Normans in the North of France was mostly 
epic, with historical and romantic themes. 

The Chansons de Geste, which constitute a poetical introduction 
to the romances of chivalry in France, were followed by Fabliax, 
metrical novelletes, which furnished material to the Italian writers 
of prose tales in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries — a form of 
composition which was not acclimatized elsewhere than in Italy in 
the sixteenth century, and which then became the remote prototype 
of our modern novels. The older and nobler knighthood blos- 
somed in France for the last time in Bayard, in England in Sir 
Philip Sidney ; but the genuine literature of chivalric romance 
may be said to have come to an end with the fifteenth century. 
The knightly romances produced in the sixteenth were belated 
and artificial examples of tlieir class ; and although the effects of 
the conquest of Grenada and the discovery of America did not 
wholly put an end to the lingering romantic spirit in Spain, it 
hardly survived them half a century. Hence the inferior charac- 
ter of the libros de cab alter os which chiefly date from the sixteenth 
century. Out of these grew the fictions known as the sixteenth 
and seventeenth century romances in Spain, France and Eng- 
land — monstrous and uninviting examples of perverted ingenuity, 
utterly dissonant from the literature of pure romance as we con- 
ceive it in the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. A 
more practical and utilitarian spirit set in with the latter half of 
the seventeenth century, in which readers found themselves out 
of sympathy with the imagination and mysterious atmosphere of 
romances. Accordingly the modern novel arose, a form of com- 



ROMANCES OF CHIVALRY 17 

position in which the manners and customs of every -day life were 
more or less faithfully depicted, which has remained in undimin- 
ished popularity to the present time. 

The cycle of Franco -Germanic or French Romance, of which 
the mythical history of Charlemagne and his Twelve Peers forms 
the central design, is so far as its literary elements are concerned, 
more ancient than the Franco-British elements, than the British 
cycle of Arthur and his knights. The reduction into prose of 
the old Chansons de Geste and of the poemes cy clique, which followed 
them, was, however, of much later date than the similar conver- 
sion of the Round Table poems ; and the fifteenth century prose 
writings are so mangled and altered from the character of the 
earlier stories in verse, that without a short notice of the latter, it 
would be impossible to get a true notion of the richness and 
copiousness of Frankish romance. All the older political liter- 
ature of this cycle is based on purely historical events and real 
personages : it is only at a later date that the events are multi- 
plied and variously misapplied, and the personages also are 
arbitrarily distorted and augmented, according to the fancy and 
local sentiments of the various writers. 

Arthur had become in Britain not only a national hero of 
romance, but a leading figure around whom might be grouped 
the adventures of subordinate knights. Charlemagne filled a 
similar place for French writers, but had the advantage of being of 
a more distinct historical character than Arthur. In the Iberian 
Peninsula, where we find the next great cycle of stories, the 
circumstances which produced the national hero, the Gd, were 
still progressive ; and his history was too real to melt into such 
romantic fiction as dealt in France and England with remote 
and shadowy paladins and wonders of Fairyland. Therefore, 
while the Cid had an ever present reality in all ballads, the 
earliest appearance of prose romance in Spain was an artificial 
imitation of the Franco -British cycle. As it was a work of great 
merit, its fictitious hero became, as it were, the central figure in 
the stories which followed, and which bore to one another a 
strong family likeness. Most of the chief heroes are illegitimate 
like Amadis of Gaul; the adventures of two brothers are told, 
and there is much similarity in incident and character. Many of 
the scenes are laid in Constantinople. 



18 THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD 



§11. Fre?ich Literature. 



The earliest form which literature took in France was that of 
epic and narrative poetry. Toward the middle of the eleventh 
century, and probably some half century earlier, poems of regular 
construction and considerable length began to be written. These 
are the Chansons de Geste, so called from their dealing with the 
Gentes, or deeds of the heroic families of legendary or historical 
France. A Chanson de Geste defined is a narrative poem dealing 
with a subject connected with French history, written in verse 
of ten or twelve syllables, which verses are arranged in stanzas 
of arbitrary length, each stanza possessing a distinguishing 
assonance or rhyme in the last syllable of each line. The period 
of the composition of these poems extended, speaking roughly, 
over three centuries. In the eleventh they began ; but of the un- 
doubted works of this period we have one example only, the 
Chanson de Roland. In the twelfth century they became very 
frequent, and from this period date the most of the best of them. 
The thirteenth century also produces them in great numbers ; 
but by this time a sensible change has come over their number, 
and after the beginning of the fourteenth century only a few 
pieces deserving the title are written . In the numerous poems of 
this class there is recognizable, in the first place, a distinct family 
likeness which is common to the earliest and latest; and, in the 
second, the natural difference of manners, which the lapse of 
three hundred years might be expected to occasion. There is a 
sameness, which almost amounts to monotony, in the plot of most 
of the Cha?isons de Geste — the hero is always either falsely accused 
of some crimes, or else treacherously exposed to the attacks of 
Saracens, or of his own countrymen. The agents of this treach- 
ery are commonly of the blood of the arch-traitor Garslon, and 
are almost invariably discomfited by the good knight or his 
friend's avengers. The part which Charlemagne plays in these 
poems is not usually dignified ; he is represented as easily gulled, 
capricious, and almost ferocious in temper, ungrateful, ready to 
accept bribes and gifts. His good angel is always Duke Naimes 
of Bavaria, the Nestor of the Carlovingian epic. In the earliest 
Chanson the part played by woman is not so conspicuous as in 
the later, but in all except Rolaiid she has considerable promi- 
nence. Sometimes the heroine is the wife, daughter, or niece of 
Charlemagne, sometimes a Saracen princess. But, in either case, 



FRENCH LITERATURE 19 

she is apt to respond without much delay to the hero's advances, 
which, indeed, she sometimes anticipates. The conduct of the 
knights to these ladies is also far from being what we now con- 
sider chivalrous. Blows are very common, and seem to be taken 
by the weaker sex as a matter of course. The prevailing legal 
forms are simple, and rather sanguinary. The judgment of God, 
as shown by The Ordeal of Battle, settles all disputes ; but battle 
is not permitted unless several nobles of weight and substance 
come forward as sponsors to each champion ; and sponsors as 
well as principals risk their lives in case of the principals' defeat, 
unless they can tempt the king's cupidity. Their versification is 
pleasing to the ear and their language, considering its age, is of 
surprising strength, expressiveness, and even wealth. Though 
they lack the variety, the pathos and mystical attraction of the 
Arthurian romance, there is little doubt that they paint far more 
accurately than their successors, an actually existing state of 
society : that which prevailed in the palmy time of the feudal 
system, when war and religion were deemed the sole subjects 
worthy to occupy seriously men of station and birth. In giving 
utterance to this warlike and religious sentiment, few periods and 
classes of literature have been more strikingly successful. The 
method of composition and publication of these poems was pecu- 
liar. Ordinarily, though not always, they were composed by the 
Trouveres, and performed by the Jongleurs . Sometimes the Trou- 
veres condescended to performance, and sometimes the Jongleurs 
aspired to composition, but not usually. The poet was commonly 
a man of priestly or knightly rank, and the performer, who might 
be of either sex, was probably of no particular station. The 
Jongleur, or Jongleurs, wandered from castle to castle, reciting 
the poems, and usually interpolating in them recommendations of 
the quality of their wares, requests to the audience to be silent, 
and appeals to their generosity. 



The Romance Language is the name given to a kind of bastard 
Latin, which came into common use in Western Europe after the 
fall of the Roman Empire, among the populations formerly sub- 
ject to Rome; while the Northern conquerors, the Goths, the 
Franks, the Burgundians, the Longobards and so on, spoke their 
own languages or dialects, which are called by the chronicles the 
" Lingua Teutonica or Teutisca." The conquered people were 



20 THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD 

called by the general name of Romans, from whence came the 
name of the language which was called "vulgaris." In the 
course of time, however, the conquerors adopted the language of 
the conquered, who, being more instructed, furnished most of the 
priests and scholars of the age. But the language thus adopted 
by both the conquered and the conquering nations, although 
essentially formed of Latin elements, differed according to the 
various admixture of the Northern with the Roman people. 

Of the various dialects thus formed, that of the South of 
France became a refined language sooner than the others, and 
retained its superiority from the tenth to the thirteenth century, 
when the Italian, Portuguese and Spanish languages assumed the 
regular grammatical or literary form which they have since re- 
tained. As already said, it was called the Langne d'oc from the 
manner in which the inhabitants expressed the word oc as an 
affirmative yes, as distinguished from the dialect spoken north 
of the Loire which expressed the affirmative by ouz, and was 
called Langue d'oil, or d'oui. The romance language of the South 
of France has gradually fallen into disuse, having given way to 
Northern French. The latter appears to have originally dif- 
fered but little from the other dialect, but it gradually changed its 
terminations and assumed other peculiarities of form, which have 
been retained in modern French. It is demonstrated by Ray- 
noard that the inhabitants of Northern France, in the ninth cen- 
tury, spoke the same language as those of the South. 

§ 12. Scholasticism. 

The long and barren period, which intervened between Proclus 
of the fifth century, in whom the speculative activity of ancient 
Greece disappeared and Bacon of the sixteenth century, in whom 
it was reformed and fertilized, was characterized, as a whole, by 
indistinctness of ideas, bias of authority and impatience of dis- 
sent. Poverty of thought disposed men to lean more upon an 
intellectual superior — Plato, Aristotle, or the Fathers of the 
Church ; to read nature through books ; to talk of what great 
geniuses had said ; to study the opinions of others as the only 
mode of forming their own ; to criticise, to interpret, to imitate, 
and to dispute. The subtlety, which found in certain accredited 
writings all the truth it desired, forbade others to find, there or 
elsewhere, any other truths. The slave became the tyrant. 

The Christian Fathers made philosophy the handmaid of re- 



SCHOLASTICISM 2 1 

ligion . The whole philosophic effort was to mediate between the 
dogmas of faith and the demands of reason, with Church doctrine 
as the criterion or standard. The method was threefold : First, 
that of the Fathers themselves, built on Scripture, modified by 
the principles of the Grecian schools ; secondly, conjointly with 
Scripture, the use of the Fathers themselves ; and, thirdly, the 
application of the Aristotelian Dialectics, that branch of Logic 
which teaches the rules and modes of reasoning. Philosophy 
subservient to the Christian articles of belief was called Scholasti- 
cism, a name derived from the cloister schools, opened by Charle- 
magne for the pursuit of speculative studies ; which in those days 
were pursued only by the clergy, they alone having leisure or 
inclination for such work. The teachers of the seven Liberal Arts, 
as also afterwards all who occupied themselves with philosophy, 
following the traditions and examples of the Schools, were called 
Scholastics. Scholasticism, therefore, maybe defined as the repro- 
duction of ancient philosophy under the control of ecclesiastical doc- 
trine, with an accommodation, in case of discrepancy between them: 
of the for?ner to the latter. The leading representatives till the 
fourteenth century are Brigena, with whom it begins, born and 
educated in Ireland, 800-877, whose views are decidedly Pla- 
tonic ; Roscellin, and his pupil, Abelard of France, 1079-1142; 
Peter Lombard, died 1164 ; Thomas Aquinas of Italy, 1 224-1 274 ; 
Anselm of Normandy, 1033-1109; Alexander Hales, the Irre- 
fragable, died 1245 ; and Duns Scotus of England, in the latter 
part of the thirteenth century. 

Plato taught Realism, the doctrine that universals, genera, 
species, or types, have a real existence apart from individual 
objects ; Aristotle, on the contrary, taught Nominalism, the doc- 
trine that only individuals exist in reality — that abstract ideas are 
nothing but abstractions, general names, not general things. 

In the eleventh century, before Abelard founded the scholastic 
theology, the authoritative list of liberal studies at Oxford was 
given in the single line, 

Lingua, Tropus, Ratio, Numerus, Tonus, Angelus, Astra. 

Most students were content with the first three — Grammar, 
Rhetoric and Logic ; and a few pursued Arithmetic, Music, 
Geometry and Astronomy, if these grave names may be properly 
applied to the strange mixture of fact and fancy, which, in 
obscure Latin versions of Greek and Arabian originals, passed for 



22 THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD 

Science. It was this privileged circle, which scholastic divinity 
successfully invaded in the twelfth century under Abelard, the 
success of the invasion being probably due to the fact, that reli- 
gion was then the only thing that could be systematically studied. 
In the last half of the fifteenth century, when Erasmus was still 
a student, before the Greek had been admitted to the circle of 
the liberal arts, the regular twelve years' course of study included, 
and had long included, reading, arithmetic, grammar, syntax, 
poetry, rhetoric, metaphysics and theology, all studied in Latin ; 
and of these subjects, metaphysics and theology occupied the 
whole time or all the time of the University period. 

In the retrogressive period of the fifteenth century, intellectual 
life disappeared with religious liberty. Learning declined, espe- 
cially at Oxford. Her scholars became travelling mendicants, 
whose academic credentials were at times turned into ridicule and 
mockery by the insolence of rank and wealth. The monasteries 
were no longer the seats of culture. Twenty years after Chaucer's 
death an Italian said : "I found in them men given up to sen- 
suality in abundance, but very few lovers of learning, and those 
of a barbarous sort, skilled more in quibbles and sophisms than 
in literature." In this period the race of great schoolmen had 
died out, and the schools only repeated and maintained, with 
ever-increasing emptiness, what their founders had taught. The 
whole science of Dialectics was degraded into an elaborate and 
ingenious word-quibbling. like religion, it had no other sub- 
stance but one of words. Scholasticism was self-extinguished in 
a period of barbarity, into whose darkness the light of the Re- 
naissance was destined soon to shine with regenerating effect. 
What had the laborers accomplished? But, if from heart or brain 
they educed no great original creed, they produced a ferment of 
intellectual activity such as Europe had never seen. Through 
the long terrible night which threatened the extinction of scholar- 
ship, they kept alive the spirit of culture, in the whirlwind of 
energy. Disputation, if it adds no single idea to the human 
mind, is better than indolence in action ; in cognition lie life and 
acquirement. The highest value of truth is less in possession 
than in pursuit of it. Could you ever possess a theory of the 
universe that were entire and final, man were then spiritually 
defunct. 



ARISTOTLE AND PLATO 23 

§ 13. Aristotle and Plato. 

So far as it concerns the history of philosophy the Renaissance 
meant the revival of Platonism and the insurgence of scholastic 
antiquity. Never had monarch been so nearly universal and 
absolute as Aristotle. For two thousand years he had dictated to 
the nations what to believe. Amid all the commotions of the 
empire and war of words, he had kept his throne and state, 
unshaken and undisturbed. His autocratical edict was placed by 
the side of the Gospel. His ten categories, which pretend to 
classify every object of human apprehension, were held as another 
revelation. Universities were his sentinels: parliaments issued 
decrees banishing those who maintained theses against him . His 
name was a synonym for reason. To contradict him was to con- 
tradict the Church, whose integrity was based on the immovable 
conformity of all human opinions. In vain did Galileo try to 
convince the learned of Pisa that bodies of unequal weight, 
dropped from the same height, would reach the ground in equal 
times. They saw the weights fall from the top of the tower and 
saw them strike the ground at the same time ; but they would not 
believe, for Aristotle had said that a ten -pound weight would fall 
ten times as fast as a one-pound weight. A student having 
detected spots on the sun communicated his discovery to a worthy 
priest, who replied : 

" My son, I have read Aristotle many times, and I assure you 
there is nothing of the kind mentioned by him. Go, rest in 
peace ; and be certain that the spots which you have seen are in 
your own eyes, and not in the sun." 

But early in the sixteenth century revolt had broken out in 
Italy, in Spain, in France, in Germany, and even in England. In 
1583 a royal commission abolished from the two universities the 
works of Duns Scotus. Said the reporter in a tone of triumph : 
" We have set Dunce in Bocardo, and have utterly banished him 
from Oxford forever, with all his blind glasses ;" that is, in the 
Oxford jail. 

What the Reformation exhibits in the sphere of religion and 
politics, the Revival of Letters displays in the sphere of culture, 
art and science — the recovered energy and freedom of humanity. 
Both are the effects of phases, each by reaction a stimulant and a 
cause ; the first ethical, the second intellectual ; the one Chris- 
tian, the other classical, in contrasted language, pagan. The 
Renaissance, however, is commonly understood to be the renova- 



24 THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD 

tion of the intellect only — the outburst of human intelligence, 
which, abroad in the fifteenth century, and at home in England 
in the sixteenth century, marks the epoch of human growth. It 
was the resuscitation of the taste, the eloquence and song of 
antiquity, of the gods and heroes of Olympus, of the eternal art 
and thought of Athens. It was after a long oblivion, the reap- 
pearance, with others high and luminous, of the " divine Plato," 
who alone among books is entitled to Omar's fanatical compli- 
ment to the Koran : " Burn the libraries, for their value is in this 
volume." All who went before were his teachers : all who came 
after were his debtors. Everything of grand proportions is his. 
Whoever has given a spiritual expression to truth has voiced 
him. Whoever has had vision of the realities of being has stood 
in his hallowed light — the Elizabethans no less than others » 
But for the magnitude of his genius, Shakespeare would be the 
most eminent of Platonists. Would you understand the lofty 
insight, the celestial ardor of the Fairy Queen, the first great 
ideal poem in the English tongue, you must reascend to the serene 
solitude of Plato and watch the lightnings of his imagination, 
playing on the illimitable. His sentences are the corner-stones of 
a speculative school, the fountain head of literature, and of the 
culture of nations. What renders him immortally noble, and 
irresistibly, attractively noble, is his moral aim, his sympathy with 
truth, arrayed in unsullied light. As for himself he thus speaks : 
"I, therefore, Callicles, am persuaded by these accounts, and 
consider how I may exhibit my soul before the judge in a healthy 
condition. Wherefore, disregarding the honors which most men 
value, and looking to the truth, I shall endeavor in reality to live 
as virtuously as I can ; and when I die, to die so. And I invite 
all other men to the utmost of my power. ' ' 

§ 14. Dante. 

As the author of Vita Naova Dante belongs to the sacred lyric 
school. The whole novelty and poetic power of this school, 
which really was the beginning of Italian art, consists in a power 
of expressing the feelings of the soul in the way in which love 
inspires them, in an appropriate and graceful manner, fitting form 
to matter, and by art, fusing the one with the other. The Tuscan 
lyric poetry, the first true Italian art, is pre-eminent in this art- 
istic fusion of the spontaneous and, at the same time, deliberate 
action of the mind. The Vita Nuova of Dante is a little book of 



DANTK 25 

poetry and prose, which tells the story of his love for Beatrice, 
who is prett}^ generally held to be the daughter of Folco Porti- 
nari. In the lyrics of the Vita Nuova — so called by its author, to 
indicate that his first meeting with Beatrice was the beginning for 
him of a life entirely different from that he had hitherto led — there 
is a high idealization of love. It seems there was in it nothing 
earthly or human, and that the poet had his eyes constantly fixed 
on heaven while singing of his lady. Everything is supersensual, 
aerial, heavenly, and the real Beatrice is always gradually passing, 
melting more and more into the symbolic one — passing out of her 
human nature into the divine. The life of Dante covered a period 
of fifty-six years — 1 2 68- 1 3 2 1 . 

The work, which made Dante immortal and raised him above 
all other men of genius in Italy, was his Divina Commedia. The 
author himself called it a comedy, as he says, for two reasons : 
because it has, like comedies, a sad beginning and a cheerful 
ending; and because it is written in a "middle style," treating 
alike of lofty and of lowly things. 

An allegorical meaning is hid under the literal one of the Com- 
media. Dante, travelling through the invisible world is a symbol of 
mankind, aiming at the double object of temporal and eternal happi- 
ness. By the forest, in which the poet loses himself, is meant the 
civil and religious confusion of society, deprived of its two guides, 
the Emperor and the Pope. The mountain illuminated by the sun 
is universal monarchy. The three beasts are the three vices, and 
the three powers which offered the greatest obstacles to Dante's 
designs. Envy is Florence, light, fickle and divided by the Bianchi 
and Neri ; Pride is the house of France ; Avarice is the Papal 
Court ; Virgil represents- reason and the empire ; and Beatrice is 
the symbol of the supernatural, without which man cannot attain 
to the supreme end, which is God. 

But the merit of the poem does not lie in the allegory. What 
is new in it is the individual art of the poet, the classic art trans- 
ferred for the first time into a romance. Dante is above all a great 
artist. Where then he describes nature, analyzes the passions, 
curses the vices, or sings hymns to the virtues, he is always won- 
derful for the grandeur and delicacy of his art. Out of the rude 
mediaeval vision he has made the greatest work of modern times. 
He took the materials of his poem from theology, from philosophy, 
from history, from mythology, but more especially from his own 
passions, from hatred and love ; and he has breathed the breath of 
genius into all his materials. Under the pen of the poet the dead 



26 THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD 

come to life again : they become men again, and speak the lan- 
guage of their passions. 

§ 15. Petrarch. 

The Divina CommediaS^ed and already defined the destiny of 
Italian literature, to give artistic lustre and hence immortality to 
all the forms of literature which the Middle Ages had produced. 
Two facts characterize the literary life of Petrarch, who lived from 
1304 to 1374 : classical research, and the mere human feeling intro- 
duced into his lyric poetry . Nor are these two facts separate — rather 
the one is the result of the other. The Petrarch, who wandered 
about unearthing the w T orks of the great Latin writers, helps us to 
understand the Petrarch who, having completely detached him- 
self from the Middle Ages, loved a real lady with a human love, and 
celebrated her in her life, and after death in poems full of studied 
elegance. Petrarch was the first humanist, and he was at the 
same time the first lyric poet of the modern school. His career 
was long and tempestuous. He lived for many years at Avinon 
or Avignon, cursing the corruptions of the Papal court ; he trav- 
elled through nearly the whole of Europe ; he corresponded with 
Emperors and Popes ; he was considered the first man of letters of 
his time ; he had honors and riches ; but he always bore about 
within him discontent, melancholy and incapacity for satisfaction — 
three characteristics of the modern man. 

It is not very certain who was the lady loved by Petrarch. 
There are some reasons for believing that she was called L,aura de 
Noves, and was the wife of Hugo de Sade, but this is far from 
being proved. It appears anyhow that the lady lived at Avignon. 

§ 16. Boccaccio. , 

Boccaccio lived from i3i3toi375. As a poet he must be deter- 
mined less by the intrinsic value of his work than by his function 
as a precursor, essaying a new development of his art and forecast- 
ing its course in the future. Immediately below the other com- 
ponents of the great triad of the earlier Renaissance, he was, in a 
truer sense than either, the pioneer of subsequent Italian song. 
The unapproachable loftiness of Dante's theme forbade imitation: 
the narrower limitation of Petrarch's condemned it to inane reitera- 
ation. But Boccaccio, in giving the metrical romance an estab- 
lished place in literature, supplied the poetry of the future with its 
favorite outlet of expression, and opened up to it a new and 
inexhaustible field of subjects in harmony with modern taste. 



BOCCACCIO 27 

The form, moreover, of the later Italian epic was that which was 
first adopted by him as the best calculated for versified narrative. 
The octave stanza, though not of his absolute invention, since it 
already existed in popular song, owes to him its introduction to that 
higher sphere of cultivated letters, where it latterly came to occupy 
so large a space. The Teseide thus forms a landmark in Italian 
literature, as the earliest attempt to set a heroic subject to that 
plebeian phrase of melody , destined to form the structural basis of 
all the verse music of the Renaissance. 

The Teseide is the tale of two Theban knights, Palamon and 
Arcite, both prisoners in the hands of Theseus, and rivals of the 
fair Emilia, which Chaucer has familiarized to English readers 
under the title of the Knight's Tale. In substance almost a repro- 
duction of Boccaccio's romance, his version of it, however, differs 
from it so widely in diction, style of expression, and metrical form, 
as to constitute an original and independent poem. The superior 
beauty of .the English rendering, in which more than 10.000 lines 
are represented by little more than a fifth of that number, is sheer 
artistic gain, attained by judicious compression and superior con- 
centration of idea. 

The Teseide, the earliest love tale of the Middle Ages, forms 
a connecting link between modern and mediaeval literature, and is 
memorable as the first attempt to give permanent form to a class 
of fables, extensively circulated among the unlettered people by 
oral tradition. The popular imagination, fed by the recitations of 
vagrant Jongleurs and singers, already ran riot on similar subjects ; 
and the names of Eancelot and Guinevere, of Tristram andlseult, 
of Flordelise and Brandimart, with endless variations of their 
loves and sorrows, were thus handed down from lip to lip, and 
from generation to generation. It was on this legendary store that 
Boccaccio, Sacchini and Bandello, nay, Shakespeare himself, drew 
for the raw material of their narratives. 

Chaucer, too, appropriated to his own uses some of this com- 
mon stock of early romances, borrowing it at second-hand from 
the pages of Boccaccio, with a frank license, which was not in 
those days dubbed plagiarism . The influence of foreign writers over 
his mind is explained by the absence of any literature worthy to be 
so called in his own country, until created by him on the basis of 
European culture. The break in the continuity of language, 
effected by the Norman conquest of England, had cut the country 
off from its earliest history and traditions, and the Anglo-Saxon 



28 THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD 

tongue, surviving only as the barbarous dialect of the common 
people, lost all its power of developing to a more advanced use. 
Hence the new English language, slowly evolved from the two ele- 
ments of population , and perfected in the fourteenth century almost 
to its present form, found itself without a past of its own, on which 
to found the superstructure of its future growth. It had reached a 
stage of maturity, in which the French Fabliau and the Teutonic 
Myth were alike alien, and required a new starting-point and a 
fresh fulcrum of thought, from which to work out the latent capa- 
bilities of its compound nature. This Chaucer, a man of wide 
sympathy and many-sided intelligence, gave it, by linking it to 
the awakening intellectual life of Continental Europe. 

Not only was Chaucer indebted to Boccaccio for the loan of his 
Teseide for a subject. The Decameron also supplied him with 
the tale of the " Patient Grissel " or Griselda, by its general plan 
of a group of narratives linked to a central situation, and thus the 
similarly connected situation of the Canterbury Tales. The tale 
of Troilus and Creseide, again, is an adaptation of Boccaccio's 
Filostrato, and, closer than that, of the Theban lovers in the 
Knight's Tale. 

§ 17. Medicsval Plays. 

The custom of representing, in a rude dramatic form, legends of 
the Lives of the Saints and striking episodes of Bible history, seems 
to have been introduced first into England from France, and to 
have been employed by the clergy as a means of communicating 
religious instruction to the rude population of the twelfth century. 
There exists the record of one of these spectacles, which received 
the name of Mysteries or Miracles from the sacred nature of their 
subject and personages, having been presented in the Convent of 
Dunstable in 1 119. It was called the play of St. Catherine, and 
in all probability consisted of a rude dramatized picture of the 
miracles and martyrdom of that saint, performed on the festival 
which commemorates her death. Mystery and miracle plays 
abound in the early literature of all the Catholic countries of 
Europe. Spain, Germany, France and Italy possess examples so 
abundant that a considerable library might be formed of these 
barbarous pieces ; and the habit of seeing them represented in 
public has certainly left very perceptible traces in mediaeval litera- 
ture and art. These plays were composed and acted by monks, 
and the cathedral was transformed for the nonce into a theatre. 
The stage was a species of graduated platform, in three divisions, 



RHYME IN LATIN VERSE 29 

one over the other, and placed near or over the altar, and the cos- 
tumes were furnished by the vestry of the church. The three 
platforms, into which the stage was divided, represented Heaven, 
Earth and Hell ; and the dramatis personce made their appear- 
ance on that part of the stage which corresponded with their 
nature. It was absolutely necessary that some comic element 
should be introduced to enliven the graver scenes, particularly 
as some of these representations were of an inordinate length — 
one on the subject of Creation and the Fall of Man, which 
occupied six days in the performance. This comic element 
was easily found by representing the wicked personages, whether 
human or spiritual, of the drama as placed in ludicrous situ- 
ations or surrounded by ludicrous accompaniments. Thus the 
Devil generally played the part of a clown or jester, and was 
exhibited in a light half terrific and half farcical. In an English 
mystery on the subject of the Deluge a comic scene is introduced 
by the refusal of Noah's wife to enter the ark, and by the beating 
which justly terminated her resistance and scolding. But, on the 
other hand, a mystery on the subject of the Sacrifice of Isaac 
contains a dialogue of much pathos and beauty between Abraham 
and his son. On the whole, the mystery of the Holy Sacrament 
was capable of producing a strong impression in an age of child- 
like, ardent faith. The mysteries, once the only form of dramatic 
representation, continued to be popular from the eleventh to the 
end of the fourteenth century; nay, in some pastoral and remote 
corners of Europe, where the primitive faith glows in all its 
ancient ardor, and where the manners of the people have been 
little modified by contact with foreign civilization, something very 
similar to the mysteries may be seen at the present day. In the 
retired valleys of Catholic Switzerland, in the Tyrol and in some 
little-visited districts of Germany, the peasants still annually per- 
form dramatic spectacles, representing episodes in the life of 
Christ. * * * 

§ 18. Rhyme in Latin Verse. 

This much for the substitution of accent for quantity. But hand 
in hand with the process of exchanging metre for a merely accent- 
uated rhythm went another movement. I mean the tendency to 
adopt rhyme, and to much of such regular use of it as had never 
been contemplated before. Of this process it might doubtless be 
affirmed no less than of the other, that it was in part only a 
recovery of the lost, having its rudimentary beginnings, or, at all 



30 THE MEDI^VAI, PERIOD 

events, its very clear anticipation, in the early national poetry of 
Rome. This, too, except for that event which gave to the Latin 
language a second lease of life, and revealed capabilities in it which 
had been dormant hitherto, might not, and probably would not 
now, ever have unfolded itself there, the first and more natural 
opportunity having long since passed away. Such an opportunity it 
had once enjoyed. There is quite enough of such remains of Latin 
poetry as we possess, to show that rhyme was not a new element, 
altogether alien to the language, which was forced upon it by the 
Christian poets in the days of its decline. There were early prelud- 
ings of that which should indeed only fully and systematically un- 
fold itself at the last. The tendencies of the Saturnian, and of such 
other fragments of ancient Latin verse as have reached us to ter- 
minations of a like sound, have been noticed, as this from the 
Andromache of Knnius: 

Haec omnia vidi inflammari, 
Priamo vi vitam evitari, 
Jovis aram sanguine turpari. 

The following, of more uncertain authorship, is quoted by 
Cicero (Tusc. i, 28): 

Coelum nitescere, arbores frondescere, 
Vites laetificae pampinis pubescere, 
Rami bacarum ubertate incurvescere. 
Segetes largiri frnges, florere omnia, 
Fontes scatere, herbis prata convestirier. 

Of that earlier poetry rhyme might be considered a legitimate 
ornament. And even after a system had been introduced, resting 
on altogether different principles of versification, that, I mean, of 
the Greek metres, yet was it so inborn in the language, that it 
continually made its appearance ; being no doubt only with diffi- 
culty avoided by those writers whose stricter sense of beauty taught 
them not to catch at ornaments, which were not properly theirs; 
and easily attained by those who with a more questionable taste 
were well pleased to sew it as a purple patch on a garment of 
altogether a different texture. Thus we cannot doubt that these 
coincidences of sound were seduously avoided by so great a master 
of proprieties as Virgil, in whose works, therefore, rhyming verses 
very rarely appear ; while it is difficult not to suspect that they were 
sometimes sought; or if not sought, yet welcomed when they 
offered themselves, by Ovid, in whom they occur far more fre- 
quently ; and whose less severe taste may have been willing to 
appropriate this as well as the more legitimate adornments, which 
belonged to the verse he was using. 



RHYME IN LATIN VKRSK 31 

We can trace step by step the struggle between the two prin- 
ciples of heathen and Christian life, which were here opposed to 
one another. As the classical or old Roman element grew daily 
weaker in the new Christian world which now had been founded ; 
as the novel element of Christian life strengthened and gained 
ground ; as poetry became popular again, not the cultivated enter- 
tainment of the polite and lettered few, a graceful amusement of 
the scholar and the gentleman ; but that in which all men desired 
to express, or to find expressed for them, their hopes and fears, 
their joys and their sorrows, and all the immortal longings of their 
common humanity ; then confinement became less and less endur- 
able within the old and stereotyped forms, which, having had for 
their own ends their fitness and beauty, were yet constituted for the 
expression of far other thoughts, sentiments, and hopes than those 
which now stirred at far deeper depths the spirits and the hearts 
of men. The whole scheme on which the Latin prosodical poetry 
was formed, was felt to be capricious, imposed from without; and 
the poetry which now arose demanded not, indeed, to be without 
law ; for, demanding this, it would have demanded its own destruc- 
tion, and not have been poetry at all ; but it demanded that its laws 
and restraints should be such as its own necessities, and not those 
of quite a different condition, required. 

It is something more than mere association ; more than the fact 
that these metres had been either servants of heathen worship, or 
at least appropriated to heathen themes, which induced the Church 
little by little to forsake them ; something which even at this day 
serves at once to translate us into, and to make us feel that we are 
moving in, the elements of heathen life. The bond is not thus 
merely historic and external, but spiritual and inward. And yet, at 
the same time, the influence of these associations must not be over- 
looked, when we are estimating the causes which wrought together 
to alienate the poets and hymnologists of the Christian Church 
ever more and more from the classical, and especially from the 
lyrical metres of antiquity, and which urged them to seek more 
appropriate forms of their own. In these the heathen gods had 
been celebrated and sung : the whole impure mythology had been 
arrayed and tricked out. Were they not profaned forever by these 
unholy uses to which they had been first turned ? How could the 
praises of the true and living God be fitly sung in the same ? A like 
feeling to that which induced the abandonment of the heathen 
temples, and the seeking rather to develop the existing basilicas 



32 THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD 

into Christian churches, or where new churches were built, to 
build them after the fashion of the civil and not the religious edifices 
already existing, must have been here also at work. The faithful 
would have often shrunk from the involuntary associations which 
these metres suggested, as we should shrink from hearing a psalm 
or spiritual song fitted to some tune, which had been desecrated to 
lewd or otherwise profane abuse. And truly there is, and we find 
it even now, a clinging atmosphere of heathen life shed round 
many of these metres, which it is almost impossible to dissipate. 
So that, reading some sacred thoughts which have arrayed them- 
selves in sapphics or alcaics, we are more or less conscious of a cer- 
tain contradiction between the form and the subject, as though 
they were awkwardly or unfitly matched, and one or other ought 
to have been different from what it is. 

The wonderful and abiding success of the hymns of St. Ambrose, 
and of those so-called Ambrosian, which were formed upon the 
model of his, lay doubtless in great part in the wise interest of 
choice, which led him to select a metre by far the least markedly 
metrical, and the most nearly rhythmical of all the ancient metres 
out of which it was free for him to choose — I mean the iambic 
dimeter. The time was not yet come when it was possible alto- 
gether to substitute rhythm for metre ; the old had still too much 
vitality to be cast aside, the new had not yet clearly shaped itself 
forth ; but, choosing thus, the poet escapes, as far as it was possible, 
from using these forms at all, to avoid the disturbing reminiscences 
and associations of heathen art : while at a later day, hardly anything 
so strongly revealed the extent to which Roman Catholic Italy had 
fallen back under pagar influences : it was penetrated through at 
the revival of learning with the spirit of heathen, and not of 
Christian, life: offense was then everywhere taken by Italian 
churchmen, Leo the Tenth at their head, at the unmetrical hymns 
of the Church ; and the determination was manifested to reduce 
them by force, and, at the cost of any wrong to their beauty and 
perfection, to metre — their very exemption from which was their 
glory, and that which made them to be indeed Christian hymns 
in the highest sense. 

This movement, then, which began early to manifest itself, for 
an enfranchisement from the old classical forms, this impatience 
of their restraints, was essentially a Christian one. Still we can- 
not doubt that it was assisted and made easier by the fact that the 
metrical system, against which the Church protested, and from 



RHYME IN LATIN VKRSE 33 

which it sought to be delivered, had been itself brought in from 
without. Itself of foreign growth, it could oppose no such stub- 
born resistance as it would have done, had it been native to the 
soil, had its roots been entwined strongly with the deepest founda- 
tions of the Latin tongue. But this was not the case. 

It is abundantly known to all who take any interest in the early 
poetry of Rome, that it was composed on principles of versification 
altogether different from those which were brought in with the 
introduction of the Greek models in the Sixth century of the City : 
that Latin hexameters, or " long " verses, were in all probability 
first composed by Knnius, while the chief lyric metres belong to a 
much later day, having been introduced, some of the simpler 
kinds, as the sapphic, by Catullus ; and the more elaborate, not till 
the time, and only through the successful example, of Horace. It 
is known, too, that while the hexameter took comparatively a firm 
root in the soil, and on the whole could not be said to be alien to 
the genius of the Latin tongue, the lyric metres remained exotics 
to the end, were never truly acclimated — nothing worth reading 
or being preserved having been produced in them, except by those 
who first transplanted them from Greek to Italian ground. It was 
not that the Latin language should be without its great lyric utter- 
ances, and such as should be truly its own ; but it was first to find 
these in the Christian hymns of the Middle Ages. 

The poetry of home growth — the old Italian poetry which was 
thrust out by this new- — was composed, as we learn from the frag- 
ments which survive, and from notices lying up and down, on alto- 
gether a different basis of versification. There is no reason to 
believe that quantity, except as represented by, and identified with 
accent, was recognized in it at all . For while accent belongs to every 
language and to every age of the language, that is, in pronoun- 
cing any word longer than a monosyllable, an ictus or stress must 
fall on one syllable more than on others : quantity is an invention 
more or less arbitrary. At how late a period, and how arbitrarily 
and as from without, it was imposed on the Latin, the innumer- 
able anomalies, inconsistencies and contradictions in the prosodical 
system of the language sufficiently testify. While admitting, in- 
deed, the existence of Saturnian, that is, of old Italian verses, we 
deny, with some of the best German, French and English critics, 
that there was any such thing as a Saturnian metre — that is, any 
fixed scheme or framework of long and short feet, after the Greek 
fashion — according to which these verses were composed ; these 
4 



34 .THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD 

consisting rather, as all ballad-poetry does, of a loosely defined 
number of syllables, not metrically disposed, but with places suf- 
ficiently marked, upon which the stress of the voice fell, to vindi- 
cate for them the character of verse. 

Into what these numbers would have unfolded themselves as the 
nation advanced in culture, and as the ear, gradually growing 
nicer and more exacting in its requirements, claimed a finer mel- 
ody, it is not easy to say ; but I+atin poetry, at all events, as it 
would have had a character, so would it have rested on a basis of 
versification, which was its own. And knowing this, we can 
scarcely sympathize, without reserve, in the satisfaction which 
Horace expresses at the change which presently came over it ; 
however, we may admit that, with the exception of his one greater 
contemporary, he accomplished more than any other, to excuse 
and justify, and even to reconcile us to the change. That change 
came, as is familiar to all, when, instead of being allowed such a 
process of natural development from within, it was drawn out of 
its own orbit by the too prevailing attractions of the Greek litera- 
ture, within the sphere and full influence of which the Roman 
Conquest of Greece in the sixth century of the city of Rome brought 
it — though, indeed that influence had commenced nearly a century 
before. 

The metrical forms of classical poetry the Christian Church in 
later times found ready-made to her hand, and, in their kind, hav- 
ing reached a very high perfection. But a true instinct must have 
told her at once, or after a very few trials, that these were not the 
metrical forms which she required. Yet it was not to be supposed 
that she would have the courage immediately to cast them aside, 
and to begin the world, as it were, afresh ; or, that she should have 
been enabled at once to foresee the more adequate forms, to be one 
day developed out of her own bosom. At the same time these 
which she thus inherited, while she was content of necessity to use 
them, could not satisfy her. The Gospel had brought into 
men's hearts longings after the infinite and eternal, which were 
strange to it. Beauty of outline, beauty of form — and what a flood 
of light does that one word forma, as equivalent to beauty, pour on 
the difference between the heathen and the Christian ideal of 
beauty ! This was all which the old poetry yearned after and 
strove to embody : this was all which its metrical frameworks 
were perfectly fitted for embodying. But now heaven had been 
opened, and henceforward the mystical element of modern poetry 



MKDI^VAL HYMNS 35 

demanded its rights ; vaguer but vaster thoughts were craving to 
find the harmonies to which they might be married forever. The 
boundless could not be content to find its organ in that in which 
its very perfection lay, in its limitations and its bounds. The 
Christian poets were in holy earnest ; a versification, therefore, 
could no longer be endured, attached as in their case it was, at 
least it was, by no living bonds to the thoughts, in which sense and 
sound had no real correspondence with one another. The versifi- 
cation henceforth must have an intellectual value, which should 
associate it with the onward movement of the thoughts and feel- 
ings, whereof it professed to be, and thus indeed should be, the 
expression. A struggle, therefore, commenced from the first 
between the form and the spirit, between the old heathen form and 
the new Christian spirit, the latter seeking to release itself from 
the shackles and restraints which the former imposed upon it ; and 
which were to it, not a help and a support, as the form should be, 
but a hindrance and a weakness — not liberty, but now rather a 
most galling bondage. The new wine went on fermenting in the 
old bottles till it burst them asunder, though not itself to be spilt 
and lost in the process, but so to be gathered into nobler chalices, 
vessels more fitted to contain it — new, even as that which was 
poured into them was new. 

After the investigations of later years no one ought any longer 
to affirm rhyme to have been the exclusive invention of any one 
people, and from them to have passed over into other languages 
and literatures, which Warton and Sismondi have done, who de- 
rive it originally from the Arabs. Rhyme can as little be consid- 
ered the exclusive discovery of any one people as of any one age. 
It is rather, like poetry, like music, like dramatic representation, 
the natural result of a deep craving of the human mind, as it is 
the well-nigh inevitable adjunct of poetry not quantitive. 

§ 18. MedicBval Hymns — London Quarterly Review. 

As the Western Church formed Christendom, so she formed 
anew the tongue which was to be for ages the Lingua Franca of 
her spiritual empire. And in this process of reformation she came 
upon the poetical forms of the classical literature of Pagan Rome ; 
forms not indeed indigenous to Italy, but adaptations of Hellenic 
metres, which naturalized by the genius of Bnnius and Lucretius, 
of Catullus and Horace, had supplanted the old Italian or Satur- 
nian versification, based upon rhythm. She came upon these 



36 THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD 

forms, tried them and found them wanting. More than one of 
her poets indeed used them, and not without skill ; but it may be 
said of them that they perished in the using. Thus Prudentius, 
the greatest who attempted them — the dimeter Iambic, is the 
favorite metre of his hymns, but asclepiads and trimeters are not 
unfrequent — assumes a large license in altering the value of sylla- 
bles. It is much to be regretted that this great poet, the Horace and 
Virgil of the Christians, as Bentley does not hesitate to call him, 
is little more than a name to us. Some authentic biography of 
him would supply a valuable illustration of the times in which he 
lived. But none such exists. All that we know of him is de- 
rived from forty-five beautiful and pathetic verses, which he has 
prefixed by way of preface to his ' ' Cathemerinon. ' ' It seems that 
he was a Spaniard, born in A. D. 348 ; that he received a liberal edu- 
cation, and, after practicing some years as a pleader, twice filled 
high judicial offices. Subsequently he received from the Emperor 
promotion, the nature of which has much exercised his commenta- 
tors. Archbishop Trench describes it as "a high military appoint- 
ment at court, ' ' an interpretation which at all events completely fits 
the poet's own words. At the age of fifty-six (404) he appears to 
have become imbued with a profound sense of the nothingness of 
the things among which and for which he had lived. He thus asks : 
Numquid talia proderunt 
Carnis post obitum vel bona vel mala, 
Cum jam quicquid id est, quod fueram, mors aboleverit? 

TRANSLATION : 

What will such things, good or bad, profit 
After death, when death shall have abolished 
Whatsoever now is, what I had been ? 

From that time forth he devoted himself to sacred poetry. The 
works in which he discusses theological subjects are little read 
now, although they contain many noble passages ; the questions 
with which they deal, burning enough in his time, have for the 
most part burnt out. It is upon his Cathemerinon — Christian 
Day, as we may call it — and his Burial H}onn — Ad Exeqaas De- 
functi — that his fame chiefly rests, although there are others 
hardly less noble. We essay an English version, for which we 
are afraid the only merit that can be claimed is, that it is almost a 
literal rendering of the original, the metre of which is preserved : 

Jam moesta quiesce querela ; 

Ivacrimas suspendite, matres ; 

Nullus sua pignora plangat ; 

Mors hsec reparatio vitse est. 



MEDIEVAL HYMNS 37 

Nunc suscipe terra fovendum, 
Gremioqvie hunc concipe molli, 
Honiinis tibi membra sequestro, 
Generosa et fragmina credo. 
Tu depositum tege corpus ; 
Non immemor ille requiret 
Sua munera, fictor et auctor ; 
Proprieque aenigmata vultus. 
Nos tecta fovebimus ossa, 
Violis et fronde frequenti, 
Titulumque et frigida saxa 
L/iquido spargemus odore. 

TRANSLATION : 

Now hushed be all sorrow and sighing, 

Restrain your fast tears, O, ye mothers. 

Let no one bemoan his loved lost ones ; 

This death is but life's reparation. 

Now receive him and lovingly tend him, 

O Earth ; in thy bosom fold him. 

The relics I give thee are noble ; 

Hide well this deposited body. 

For He not unmindful will seek it, 

Whose it is, whose hand fashioned and made it, 

And created it in His own likeness. 

We will honor the bones thou enshroudest 

With violets, and many a green leaf, 

The cold stones and the legends graved on them, 

With odorous unguents bedewing. 

Contemporary with Prudentius was St. Ambrose, whose hymns 
were such a living power with his great convert, St. Augustine. 
Most of those which bear his name are certainly not his. Cardi- 
nal Thomassin, a high authority, would refer to him twenty com- 
positions now extant. But Dr. Neale, as we think with good 
reason, reduces the number to ten. We give the text of one, of 
which there can be no doubt — his immortal hymn — " Veni, Re- 
demptor Gentium." The translation, which we place side by 
side, is Dr. Neale 's, and is perhaps among his happiest efforts. 
Veni, Redemptor gentium, translation: 

Ostende partum Virginis ; Come, Thou Redeemer of the earth, 

Miretur omne saeculum , Come > testi fy Th y Virgin birth ; 

Talis decet partus Deum. A11 lands admire ' a11 time a PP laud ' 

Such is the birth that fits a God. 

Alvus tumescit Virginis ; 

The Virgin womb that burden gained, 

Claustrum pudoris permanet; wkh yirgin h(mor &u unstained . 

Vexilla virtutum micant ; The banners there of virtues glow, 

Versatur in Templo Deus. God in His Temple dwells below. 



38 



THK MEDIEVAL PKRIOD 



Procedit e thalamo suo, 
Pudoris aula regia, 
Geminae gigas substantise, 
Alacris ut currat viae. 
Egressus ejus a Patre, 
Regressus ejus ad Patrem, 
Excursus usque ad iuferos, 
Recursus ad sedem Dei. 
Aequalis aeterno Patri 
Carnis strophio cingere, 
Infirma nostri corporis 
Virtute firmans perpeti. 
Prsesepe jam fulgat tuum, 
Lumenque nox spirat novum, 
Quo nulla nox interpolet, 
Fideque jugo luceat. 



Proceeding from His chamber free, 
The royal hall of Chastity ; 
Giant of two-fold substances, 
His destined way He runs elate. 
From God the Father He proceeds, 
To God the Father backs He speeds ; 
Proceeds as far as very hell ; 
Speeds back to Light ineffable. 
O equal to the Father, Thou ! 
Gird on Thy fleshy mantle now ! 
The weakness of our mortal state 
With deathless might invigorate. 
Thy cradle here shall glitter bright, 
And darkness breathe a newer light, 
When endless faith shall shine serene, 
And twilight never intervene. 



One very important feature in the verses of St. Ambrose is the 
frequency of rhymes. He was not indeed the first of Latin poets 
to use them. They are to be distinctly traced in the hymns of St. 
Hilary, who died as Bishop of Poitiers in 368, and we find them 
in germ long ages before.* But it was not until the end of the 
fourth century that the true features, which were to become dis- 
tinctive of the new lyrical Latin poetry, are clearly marked — on 
the one hand neglect of quantity, and on the other the employ- 
ment of rhyme ; not at first, doubtless, " as an accurately defined 
beauty, but as an almost unconscious development of the new 
system : " as an arbitrary ornament rather than an essential devel- 
opment of the rhythm. From this time forth these two features 
became of ever-increasing importance. Here, as in so many 
provinces, the old order is changing, giving place to the new. 
The strictness of metrical observances becomes more and more 



*Verses with middle and with final rhymes occur in every one of the Latin 
poets. As we reach the Silver Age they become more frequent in Lucan. 
See Trench's Sacred Latin Poetry, p. 37. " At first the rhymes were often 
merely vowels or assonant ones, the consonant not being required to agree ; 
or the rhyme was adhered to when this was not convenient, but disregarded 
when the needful word was not readily at hand ; or the stress of the rhyme 
was supposed to fall on an unaccented syllable, thus scarcely striking the ear ; 
or it was limited to the similar termination of a single letter, while sometimes 
on the strength of this like ending as sufficiently sustaining the melody, the 
whole other construction of the verse and arrangement of the syllables was 
neglected. ' ' 



MEDIEVAL HYMNS 



39 



relaxed, and accent marked and defined by rhyme takes their 
place. Tims, as Ampere expresses it, what was at first a mere 
11 fantasy of the ear " grew in the event to an " imperious need," 
and was transformed into a law. * * * 

And so we may trace the progress of that which was to become 
the basis of modern prosody, step by step, from its rude, timid 
and uncertain beginnings, till in the later hymnologists of the 
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in Aquinas or in Adam of St. 
Victor, it displayed all its latent capabilities and attained its final 
glory and perfection, satisfying the ear with a richness of melody 
scarcely anywhere to be surpassed. * * * 

It is with Venantius Fortunatus that the great volume of me- 
diaeval Latin poetry may be said to open. Born A. D. 530, he 
appears, like Prudentius, to have been wholly absorbed during 
his youth in worldly pursuits. They were, however, of a less 
grave kind than those which occupied the mind of the Spanish 
poet. "A master of vers de societe" as Archbishop Trench well 
expresses it, he wandered a highly favored guest from castle to 
castle in Gaul, repaying the hospitality everywhere received with 
neatly turned compliments in verse. All at once he broke off from 
this way of life and entered a monastery at Poitiers, where he 
remained for the rest of his life. He died in 609, Bishop of Poi- 
tiers. His "Vexilla Regis" marks an epoch. This world- 
famous hymn was composed on occasion of the reception of 
certain relics by St. Gregory of Tours and St. Radegund, pre- 
viously to the consecration of a church at Poitiers, and was after- 
wards used in the Passionate services of the Latin Church, where 
it holds its place to this day. Of late it has become familiar to 
Anglican congregations through Dr. Neale's translation, inserted 
with alterations, which the translator judged not to be improve- 
ments, in " Hymns Ancient and Modern." We give Dr. Neale's 
authentic version side by side with the original text : 



Vexilla regis prodeunt, 
Fulget crucis mysterium ; 
Suo carne carnis conditor, 
Suspensus est patibulo. 

Quo vulneratus insuper 
Microne dirse lanceae, 
Ut nos lavaret crimine, 
Manavit unda et sanguine. 



TRANSLATION : 

The royal Banners forward go ; 
The Cross shines forth with mystic glow > 
Where He in flesh, our flesh who made,, 
Our sentence bore, our ransom paid. 
Where deep for us the spear was dyed, 
Life's torrent rushing from His side ; 
To wash us in the precious flood, 
Where mingled water flowed with blood. 



40 THE MKDI^VAL PERIOD 

Itnpleta sunt quae cecinit Fulfilled is all that David told 

David fideli carmine, In true, prophetic song of old, 

Dicens : in nationibus Amidst the nations, God, said he, 

Regnavit a ligno Deus.* Hath reigned and triumphed from the tree. 

Arbor decora et fulgida, O Tree of Beauty ! Tree of Light ! 

Ornata regis purpura, O Tree with royal purple dight ! 

Electa digno stipite, Elect, on whose triumphant breast, 

Tarn sancta membra tangere. Those holy limbs should find their rest ! 

Beata, cujus brachiis, On whose dear name, so widely flung, 

Pretium pependit corporis, The weight of this world's ransom hung ; 

Statera facta sseculi, The price of human kind to pay, 

Prsedamque tulit tartari. And spoil the spoiler of his prey. 

As Dr. Neale points out, the rhymes here are for the greater 
part only assonant, but the principle was firmly established. A 
still greater step, however, was made by Venantius Fortunatus in 
his mastery over the trochaic trimeter, a measure which with 
various modifications was to become the glory of mediaeval 
poetry. There are one or two examples of this metre in Pruden- 
tius, but Fortunatus was the first to group it into stanzas. By 
way of a specimen we give a few verses from his famous hymn, 
Pange Lingua, with the beautiful English version by Dr. Neale : 

Crux fidelis, inter omnes, 

Arbor una nobilis ; 
Nulla talem silva profert 

Fronde, flore, germine ; 
Dulce lignum, dulci clavo, 

Dulce pondus sustinens. 

Flecte ramos, arbor alta, 

Tensa laxa viscera, 
Et vigor lentescat ille 

Ouem dedit nativitas 
Ut superni membra regis 

Miti tendens stipite. 

Sola digna tu fuisti 

Ferre pretium sseculi, 
Atque portum prseparare ; 

Area mundo naufrago, 
Quern sacer cruor perunxit, 

Fusus Agni corpore. 



*The Italic version reads in Psalm 95 : 10 : Dicite in nationibus quod Dom- 
inus regnavit a ligno. 



MEDIEVAL HYMNS 41 



translation: 



Faithful Cross above all others, 

One and only noble Tree ! 
None in foliage, none in blossom, 

None in fruit thy peers may be ; 
Sweetest wood and sweetest iron, 

Sweetest weight is hung on thee. 

Bend thy boughs, O Tree of Glory ! 

Thy relaxing sinews bend ; 
For awhile the ancient vigor, 

That thy birth bestowed, suspend ; 
And the King of heavenly beauty 

On thy bosom gently tend. 

Thou alone wast counted worthy, 

This world's ransom to uphold ; . 
For a shipwrecked race preparing 

Harbor like the Ark of old, 
With the sacred blood anointed, 

From the smitten Lamb that rolled. 

Venantius Fortunatus then definitely opened the new school, 
and it formed rapidly. From his time Latin lyric poetry lays 
aside what Ampere calls the shreds of classical metres, and 
rhyme is recognized as an essential part of a hymn. 

We cannot speak particularly of the crowd of poets who, from 
the opening of the seventh century, developed and elaborated the 
system which the great hymnologists of the twelfth and thirteenth 
centuries were to complete. It must suffice to mention such names 
as the venerable Bede, Godescalus, St. Odo of Cluny, and Not- 
scher, the inventor of the Sequence and such hymns as ' ' Appa- 
rebit Repentina," " Veni, Creator Spiritus," "Gloria, Laus et 
Honor," " Urbs Beata Jerusalem," " Deus Tuorum Militum." 
He was also the author of the following hymn, still sung in many 
churches, sometimes attributed to Charlemagne, although erro- 
neously : 

Veni, Creator Spiritus, Translation : 

Mentes tuorum visita, Cor * e > ° Creator ' S P lrlt blest > 

Imple superna gratia, And m OUr Souls take U P Th ^ rest ' 

Qu* tu creasti pectora. £ ome wlth Th ^ § race and ^avenly aid, 

To nil the hearts which Thou hast made. 

Qui diceris Paraclitus, Great Paraclete ! to Thee we cry, 

Altissimi donum Dei, O highest gift of God most high ! 

Fons vivus, ignis, charitas, O Fount of Life ! O Fire of Love ! 

Et spiritalis unctio. And sweet anointing from above ! 



42 THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD 

Tu septiformis munere, Thou iu Thy sevenfold gifts art known ; 

Digitus Paternse dexterse, The finger of God's hand we own ; 

Tu rite promissum Patris The promise of the Father Thou ! 

Sermone ditans guttura. Who dost the tongue with power endow. 

Accende lumen sensibus, Kindle our senses from above, 

Infunde amorem cordibus, And make our hearts o'erflow with love ; 

Infirma nostri corporibus With patience firm and virtue high, 

Virtute firmans perpeti. The weakness of our flesh supply. 

Hostem repellas longius, Far from us drive the foe we dread, 

Pacemque dones protinus ; And grant us Thy true peace instead ; 

Ductore sic te prsevio So shall we not, with Thee for guide, 

Vitemus omne noxium. Turn from the path of life aside. 

Per Te sciamus da Patrem, Oh, may Thy grace on us bestow 

Noscamus atque Filium, The Father and the Son to know, 

Teque utriusque Spiritum And Thee, through endless times confessed 

Credamus omni tempore. Of both th' eternal Spirit blessed. 

Deo Patri sit gloria, All glory while the ages run 

Bt Filio, qui a mortuis Be to the Father and the Son, 

Surrexit, ac Paraclito, Who rose from death, the same to Thee, 

In Saeculorum Ssecula. O Holy Ghost, eternally. 

Amen. Amen. 

Passing on we come to the golden age of this department of 
literature, the period opening with St. Peter Damiani and King 
Robert the Second of France, and closing with St. Thomas Aquinas 
and Thomas Celano. It was in this period, extending, roughly 
speaking from the year ioooto the year 1300, that there nourished 
those supreme masters of sacred song, who were what may be called 
without hyperbole, "the highest, holiest captives of the lyre." 
Chief among these, besides the four we have just mentioned, are 
Adam of St. Victor, Jacopine, Bernard of Morlaix and his sainted 
namesake of Clairvaux. * * * 

During the last hundred years of the Middle Ages, if we reckon 
them to close with the taking of Constantinople in 1453, Latin 
poetry was in full decadence ; the old fonts of inspiration seemed 
to have run dry. Sinai and Calvary were deserted for Parnassus 
and Olympus. The Renaissance was the grave of mediaeval lit- 
erature. In the new era imitation takes the place of invention, 
pedantry of inspiration ; for an Adam of St. Victor or a Jaco- 
pine, we have a Vida and a Sanazaro. Soon the impure hand of 
the renascent paganism was laid upon the offices of religion, and 
and at one time the scheme was officially entertained of replacing 
the whole existing body of Breviary hymns by new compositions, 
in the spirit, metre and language of classic Rome. It was to 



MKDI^VAIv HYMNS 43 

Zacharias Ferrarius that Clement the Sixth entrusted the task of 
manufacturing the desiderated verses, and the following doxology, 
a mere parody of Horace, may serve as a specimen of his " Nova 
Politissima Carmina : ' ' 

Unus est Divum, sacer Imperator, 
Triplicis formae, facie sub una, 
Qui polum, terras, tumidos fluctus 
Temperat Alti. 

Ferrarius published his book with Papal approbation, and 
Clement authorized the use of the compositions by the clergy in the 
divine office ; but, according to Maratti, no one availed himself of 
the permission, which is much to be wondered at, for the new 
poetry was certainly in full harmony with the spirit of the age. 
Unfortunately, however, the versifiers of the Renaissance did not 
confine themselves to the tinged bombast of their own. The 
ecclesiastical authorities, if unable to get rid altogether of Brev- 
iary hymns, were determined to ' ' reform ' ' them, that is, to reduce 
them to classical style and metre, and for this purpose they called 
to their aid from time to time the most approved pedants of the day. 
It is not necessary here for us to give the details of the Procrus- 
tean treatment which was pursued ; and we gladly pass over the 
miserable tale, how the most beautiful and venerable verses suf- 
fered amputation, elongation, incision and excision at the hands 
of men whose highest accomplishment was to 

' ' Torture one poor word a thousand ways. ' ' 

It was in the pontificate of Urban the Eighth, that the hymns 
in the Offices of the Latin Church assumed the form in which 
they have been since current. The members of the Society of 
Jesus, Famianus Strada, Tarquinius Gallucius, and Hieronymus 
Petruccius were intrusted with the task of reducing them ' ' ad 
bonum sermonem et metricas leges." A few escaped very slight 
alteration ; the great majority suffered a process of recasting, the 
result being not unlike that achieved by Borrimini in St. John L,at- 
eran, or Fuga in Sta. Maria Maggiore. As Archbishop Trench 
justly observes, "well nigh the whole grace and beauty, and 
even vigor of the composition have disappeared in the transform- 
ation." It was in Urban 's time, too, that most of the new hymns 
were added to the Breviary, although some are of later date. 
These compositions do not, in strictness, fall within our present 
subject, and there is little to tempt one to an excursion among 
them, for, in their frigid artificiality and tasteless pedantry, they 



44 THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD 

represent the last stage of poetic decay. Of all the hymns of the 
Church the "Dies Irse," most probably by Thomas of Celano, 
who died about 1255, has the widest fame : 

Dies irae, dies ilia 

Sol vet sseclum in flavilla, 

Teste David cum Sibylla. 

Quantus tremor est futurus, 
Quando Judex est venturus, 
Cuncta stricte discussurus. 

Tuba, mirum spargens sonum, 
Per sepulchra regionum, 
Coget omnes ante thronum. 

Mors stupebit et natura, 
Cum resurget creatura, 
Judicanti responsura. 

Liber scriptus proferetur, 
In quo totuin continetur, 
De quo mundus judicetur. 

Judex ergo quum sedebit, 
Quicquid latet apparebit ; 
Nil multum remanebit. 

Quid sum miser turn dicturus, 
Quern patronum rogaturus, 
Quum vix Justus sit securus ? 

Rex tremendse majestatis ! 
Qui salvandos salvas gratis, 
Salve me, fons pietatis ! 

Recordare, Jesu pie, 
Quod sura causa tuse vise, 
Ne me perdas ilia die ! 

Ouserens me sedisti lassus , 
Redemisti crucem passus : 
Tantus labor non sit cassus. 

Juste Judex ultionis ! 
Donum fac remissionis 
Ante Diem rationis. 

Ingemisco tanquam reus, 
Culpa rubet vultus meus, 
Supplicanti parce, Deus ! 

Qui Mariam absolvisti, 
Kt latronem exaudisti, 
Mihi quoque spem dedisti. 



MEDIEVAL HYMNS 45 

Preces niese non sunt dignae 
Sed tu bonus, fac benigne, 
Ne perenni cremer igne ! 

Inter oves locum praesta, 
Et ab haedis me sequestra ; 
Statuens in parte dextra. 

Confutatis maledictis, 
Flammis acribus addictis, 
Voca me, cum benedictis. 

Oro supplex et acclinis, 
Cor contritum quasi cinis ; 
Gere curain mihi finis. 

Lacrymosa dies ilia ! 
Qua resurget ex favilla 
Judicandus homo reus. 

Hinc ergo parce, Deus, 
Pie Jesu Domine, 
Dona ei requiem. 

A TRANSLATION : 

Day of wrath, O day of mourning, 
Lo, the world in ashes burning — 
Seer and Sybil gave the warning. 

O what fear man's bosom rendeth, 

When from Heaven the Judge descendeth, 

On whose sentence all dependeth ! 

Wondrous sound the trumpet flingeth, 
Through earth's sepulchre it ringeth, 
All before the Throne it bringeth. 

Death is struck, and nature quaking, 

All creation is awaking — 

To its Judge an answer making. 

Lo, the Book exactly worded, 
Wherein all hath been recorded — 
Thence shall judgment be awarded. 

When the Judge His seat attaineth, 
And each hidden deed arraigneth, 
Nothing unavenged remaineth. 

What shall I, frail man, be pleading ? 
Who for me be interceding, 
When the just are mercy needing ? 



46 THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD 

King, of majesty tremendous, 
Who dost free salvation send us, 
Fount of pity, then befriend us. 

Think, kind Jesus, my salvation 
Caused Thy wondrous Incarnation — 
Leave me not to reprobation. 

Faint and weary Thou hast sought me, 
On the Cross of Suffering brought me ; 
Shall such grace be vainly bought me ? 

Righteous Judge of Retribution, 

Grant Thy gift of absolution, 

Bre that Reck'ning Day's conclusion, 

Guilty, now I pour my moaning, 
All my shame with anguish owning ; 
Spare, O God, Thy suppliant groaning. 

Thou the sinful Mary savest, 
Thou the dying thief forgavest, 
And to me a hope vouchsafest. 

Worthless are my prayers and sighing, 
Yet, good L/ord, in grace complying, 
Rescue me from fires undying. 

With Thy favored sheep O place me ; 
Nor among the goats abase me, 
But to Thy Right Hand upraise me. 

While the wicked are confounded, 
Doomed to flames of woe unbounded, 
Call me with Thy saints surrounded. 

L,ow I kneel, with heart submission ; 
See, like ashes, my contrition — 
Help me in my last condition. 

Ah, that days of tears and mourning, 
From the dust of earth returning, 
Man for Judgment must prepare him — 

Spare, O God, in mercy spare him. 
Iyord, who didst our souls redeem, 
Grant a blessed Requiem. 

Amen. 



ANOTHER VERSION : 

The day of wrath, that dreadful day, 
Shall the whole earth in ashes lay, 
As David and the Sybil say. 



MEDIEVAL HYMNS 47 

What horror must invade the mind, 
When the approaching Judge shall find 
Few venial faults in all mankind ! 

The last loud trumpet's wondrous sound 
Shall through rending tombs rebound, 
And wake the nations under ground. 

Nature and death shall with surprise 

Behold the trembling sinner rise, 

To view his Judge with conscious eyes. 

Then shall, with universal fear, 

The seven-sealed judgment book appear, 

To scan the whole of life's career. 

The Judge ascends His awful throne, 
Bach secret sin shall here be known ; 
All must with shame confess their own. 

Ah, wretched ! what shall I then say, 
What patron find, my fears t' allay, 
When even the just shall fear that day ? 

Thou mighty, formidable King ! 

Of mercy unexhausted spring ! 

Save me ! O save ! and comfort bring. 

Remember what my ransom cost ; 
Let not my dear-bought soul be lost, 
In storms of guilty terrors tost. 

In search of me why feel such pain ? 
Why on the Cross such pangs sustain, 
If now those suff' rings must be vain ? 

Avenging Judge, whom all obey, 
Cancel my debt, too great to pay, 
Before the sad accounting day. 

O'erwhelmed, oppressed with doubts and fears, 
Their load my soul in anguish bears ; 
I sigh, I weep — accept my tears. 

Thou who wast moved at Mary's grief, 
Who didst absolve the dying thief, 
Dost bid me hope, O grant relief. 

Reject not my unworthy prayer, 
Preserve me from the dangerous snare, 
Which death and gaping hell prepare. 

Give my immortal soul a place 
Among Thy chosen right-hand race, 
The sons of God and heirs of grace. 



48 THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD 

From that insatiate abyss, 

Where flames devour and serpents hiss, 

Deliver me, and give me bliss. 

Prostrate my contrite heart I rend, 
My God, my Father and my Friend, 
Do not forsake me in the end. 

Well may they cnrse their second birth, 
Who rise to a surviving death. 

Thou great Creator of mankind, 

L,et all Thy faithful mercy find. Amen. 

Of all the Latin hymns of the Church this has the widest fame, 
for, as Daniel has truly remarked : Btiam illi, quibus Latini Kc- 
clesiae hymni prorsus ignoti sunt, hunc certe norunt, et si qui 
inveniuntur ab humanitate turn alieni ut carminum sacrorum 
suavitatem nihil sentiant, ad hunc certe hymnum, cujus quot 
verba tot tonitrua sunt, animun advertunt. The grand use of 
which Goethe has made of it in his Faust may have helped to 
bring it to the knowledge of some who would not themselves have 
known it ; or, if they had, would not have believed its worth, if a 
prophet of their own had not thus set his seal upon it. To another 
illustrious man this hymn was eminently dear. How affecting is 
that incident recorded of Sir Walter Scott by his biographers — 
how in those last days of his life, when all of his great strength 
had failed, or was failing, he was yet heard to murmur to himself 
some lines of this hymn, an especial favorite with him in other 
days. It is related in like manner of the Karl of Roscommon 
that some lines from his own translation were the last that he 
uttered. See Johnson's Lives. 



Gloria in Excelsis Deo, 
Et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis. 

Iyaudamus Te, beneficimus Te, 

Adoramus Te, glorificamus Te. 
Gratias agimus Tibi, propter magnam gloriam, 
Domine Deus, Rex coelestis, Deus Pater omnipotens, 

Domine Fili unigenite, Jesu Christe. 
Domine Deus, Agnus Dei, Filius Patris, 
Qui tollis peccatti mundi, miserere nobis, 
Qui tollis peccata mundi, suscipe deprecationen nostram, 
Qui sedes ad dexteram Patris, miserere nobis. 
Qouniam Tu solus Sanctus, Tu solus Altissimus, Jesu Christe, 

Cum Sancto Spiritu in Gloria Dei Patris. Amen. 

— Added 



THE RENAISSANCE 49 

§19. The Renaissance. 

Renaissance, Renascence, or Ri?iascenza, is a term which has 
recently come into use to indicate a well-known but indefinite 
space of time, and a certain phase in the development of the 
European races. On the one hand, it denotes the transition 
from that period of history, which we call the Middle Ages, 
to that which we call Modern. On the other hand, it implies 
those changes in the intellectual and moral attitude of the West- 
ern nations by which the transition was characterized. If we 
insist upon the literal meaning of the word, the Renaissance 
was a rebirth, and it is needful that we should inquire of what 
it was the rebirth. The metaphor of Renaissance may signify 
the entrance of European nations upon a fresh stage of vital 
energy in general, implying a fuller consciousness and a freer 
exercise of faculties than had belonged to the Mediseval Period ; 
or, it may mean the resuscitation simply of the intellectual fac- 
ulties, stimulated by the revival of antique learning, and its 
application to the arts and literature of modern peoples. Upon 
our choice between these two interpretations of the word depends 
important differences in any treatment of the subject. The former 
has the disadvantage of making it difficult to separate the Renais- 
sance from other historical phrases — the Reformation, for example, 
with which it is not to be confounded. The latter has the merit 
of assigning a specific name to a limited series of events and 
group of facts, which can be distinguished for the purpose of 
analysis from other events and facts, with which they are inti- 
mately but not indissolubly connected. In other words, the one 
definition of Renaissance makes it denote the whole change which 
came over Europe at the close of the Middle Ages. The other 
confines it to what was known by our ancestors as the Revival of 
Learning. Yet when we concentrate attention upon the recovery 
of antique culture, we become aware of the fact, that this was only 
one phenomenon or symptom of a far wider or more comprehen- 
sive alteration in the condition of the European races. In fact, 
we find it needful to retain both terms, Renaissance and Revival 
of Learning, and to show the relation between the series of events 
and facts which they severally imply. 

The Renaissance was the last stage of the Middle Ages, emerg- 
ing from the ecclesiastical and feudal despotism, developing what 
was original in Mediaeval ideas by the light of classic arts and 
letters, holding in itself the promise of the Modern World. It was, 

5 



50 THE RENAISSANCE 

therefore, a period and a process of transition , of fusion, of prepa- 
ration, of tentative endeavor. And just at this point the real 
importance of the Revival of Learning may be indicated. That 
rediscovery of the classic past restored to men the confidence in 
their own faculties, striving after freedom ; it revealed the con- 
tinuity of history and the identity of human nature, in spite of 
diverse creeds and different customs ; it held up for emulation 
master works of literature, philosophy and art ; it provoked in- 
quiry ; it encouraged criticism ; and it shattered the narrow mental 
barriers imposed by mediaeval orthodoxy. Humanism denotes a 
specific bias, which the forces of literature in the Renaissance took 
from contact with the ancient world ; the particular form assumed 
by human self-esteem at that epoch ; and the ideal of life and 
civilization evolved by the modern nations. It indicates the en- 
deavor of man to re-constitute himself as a free being, not as the 
thrall of theological despotism ; and the peculiar assistance he 
derived, in this effort, from Greek and Roman literature, the 
Litter ae Humanioi'es , letters or learning, leaned rather to the side of 
man than of divinity. 

The Renaissance, if we try to regard it as a period, was essen- 
tially the transition from one historical stage to another. It can- 
not, therefore, be confined to strict chronological limits. This 
indecision, inherent in the nature of a process, which involved 
neither a political revolution nor the promulgation of a new 
religious creed, but a gradual metamorphosis of the intellectual 
and moral state of Europe, is further augmented by the different 
epochs at which the several nations were prepared to bear their 
part in it. England, for example, was still feudal and mediaeval, 
when Italy had socially and mentally entered upon the modern 
stadium. It is not possible indeed to fix boundaries in time for a 
movement, which in 1368 had nearly reached the same point in 
Italy as it afterwards attained at the close of the sixteenth century 
in England. The Renaissance must indeed be viewed mainly as 
an internal process, whereby spiritual energies latent in the Middle 
Ages were developed into activity, and thus formed a mental 
habit for the modern world. The process began in Italy, and 
gradually extended to the utmost bounds of Europe, producing 
similar results in every nation and establishing a common civili- 
zation. 

There is one date, however, which may be remembered with 
advantage as the starting point in time of the Renaissance, after 



thk renaissance: 51 

the departure from the Middle Ages had been definitely and con- 
sciously made by the Italians. This is the year 1453, when Con- 
stantinople, chosen for his capital by Constantine, the first Chris- 
tian Emperor of Rome, fell into the hands of the Turks. One 
of the survivals of the Old World, the shadow of what had been 
the Eastern Empire, now passed suddenly away. Almost at the 
same date that visionary revival of the Western Empire, which 
had imposed for six centuries upon the imagination of Mediaeval 
Europe, hampering Italy and impeding the consolidation of Ger- 
many, ceased to be reckoned among political actualities ; while 
its more robust rival, the Roman Church, seemed likely to sink 
into the rank of a petty Italian principality. Three lights of 
mediseval Christendom, the Eastern Empire, the Holy Roman 
Empire, and the Papacy, at this point of time, severally suffered 
extinction, moral enfeeblement and profound internal transforma- 
tion. It was demonstrated by the destruction of the Eastern and 
the dotage of the Western Empire, and by the new papal policy 
which Nicholas V inaugurated, that the old order of society was 
about to be superseded. Nothing remained to check those cen- 
trifugal forces in State and Church, which substituted a confeder- 
ation of rival European powers for the earlier idea of universal 
monarchy, and separate religious constitutions for the previous 
Catholic unity. At the same time the New learning, introduced 
by the earliest Humanists, awakened new thought, encouraged 
curiosity, and prepared the best minds of Europe for speculative 
audacities from which the schoolmen would have shrunk, and 
which soon expressed themselves in acts of cosmopolitan import- 
ance. The New learning had been gladly received, but its vast 
significance was hardly understood. Both secular and spiritual 
potentates delighted in the beauty and fascination of those elo- 
quent words which scholars, poets and critics uttered, words 
indeed, but words which drew armed hosts behind them. 

If we look a little forward, to the years intervening between 
1442 and 1500, we obtain a second date of great importance. In 
these years the expedition of Charles VII to Naples opened Italy 
to French, Spanish and German interference. The reviving 
nations of Europe began to compete for the whole of the Italian 
Peninsula, and learned men sought that culture, which the Italians 
had perfected. In those years the secularization of the Papacy 
was carried to its final point by Alexander VI, and the Reforma- 
tion became inevitable. The same period was marked by the 



52 THE RENAISSANCE 

Discovery of America, the exploration of the Indian seas, and 
the consolidation of the Spanish nationality. It also witnessed 
the application of printing to the diffusion of knowledge, the 
revolution effected in military operations by the use of gunpowder, 
and the revolution in Cosmology, which resulted from the Coper- 
nican discovery. Thus, roughly speaking, the half century be- 
tween 1450 and 1500 may be termed the culminating point of the 
Renaissance. The transition from the mediaeval to the modern 
order was now secured, if not accomplished ; and a Rubicon had 
been crossed from which no retrogression to the past was possible. 
Rooking a little farther on to the years 1527 and 1530, a third 
decisive date is reached. In the first of these years happened the 
sack of Rome ; in the second, the pacification of Italy by Charles, 
the Fifth, under a Spanish Hegemony. The age of the Renais- 
sance was now closed for the land that gave it birth. The Re- 
formation had taken hold in Northern Europe. The Counter- 
Re volution was already imminent. 

§ 20. The Renaissance in Italy. 

In the fourteenth century the Italian nation was far in advance 
of all the other European nations in development. The arts, one 
by one, Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, Poetry, had awakened 
from Gothic and Lombard barbarism, and by the time of Petrarch 
and Boccaccio, during the earlier Renaissance, Italy, and Florence 
" the eye of Italy," were capable of expressing all the forms of 
art, constructive, plastic and poetic. But her mediaeval period 
was passed. At the end of the fourteenth century there was 
hardly a city in Italy, excepting Florence, Genoa and Venice, 
that had not fallen under the dominion of a family of despots, 
when literature and the arts in them ceased to flourish. From the 
death of Petrarch — 1374 — for fifty years no man of first-rate 
dignity appears in Italy. Yet the sacred fire awakened was not 
dormant. For a hundred years after the publication of the De- 
cameron, in 1375, that is, from the beginning of the last quarter 
of the fourteenth century to the beginning of the fifteenth, the 
genius of Italy was engaged in an exploring pilgrimage. The 
whole time was devoted by the Italians to the study of antiquity. 
It was employed in extending, in every sense, the knowledge and 
resources of the friends of the Muses. A series of little revivals 
in ancient literature may be traced through the whole course of 
the Middle Ages ; and it is not true that antiquity was discovered 



THE RENAISSANCE IN ITALY 53 

at an} 7 given epoch, for antiquity had never been wholly lost. 
Still, what is properly called the Renaissance in Italy is reckoned 
from the taking of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453 till the 
death of Ariosto in 1533, a period of eighty years. By the cap- 
ture of Constantinople many Greeks were thrown abroad in Italy, 
bringing along with them their books and learning. 

The Italian Renaissance, by virtue of the study of the Greek 
authors, returned to reality, to nature, to truth, with an exquisite 
sense of the beautiful, above all, of the beautiful in plastic art ; 
and thus it liberated the human spirit from all mysticism, from 
every mediaeval scholastic abstraction, and opened the way to 
modern thought. The Italians were never themselves until they 
were brought into contact with antiquity. This made the Renais- 
sance a national, a patriotic, a dramatic movement. The return 
to the classics, however, was not only a national necessity : it was 
also a fact, a necessuy of the human mind, which by these means 
alone could issue from medievalism ; and on this account, it was 
called Humanism. If the Italians had not then been at the front, 
it is certain that the English, the Germans, or the French must 
have come up on the same road. This alone explains, also, how 
the movement, initiated by the Italians, spread so rapidly through- 
out Europe ; and it also explains how Humanism, having outlived 
the fifteenth century, persists even to this day in being a substan- 
tial element in the culture and education of modern people. 

First of all, there was formed a human individuality, which 
was wanting in the Middle Ages. As Burckhardt has said, the 
man was changed into the individual. He began to feel and assert 
his own personality. As a consequence of this, the idea of fame 
and a desire for it was aroused. A really enthused class, in the 
modern meaning of the term, arose, and the conception was arrived 
at — completely unknown in former times — that the worth of a man 
did not depend at all upon his birth, but upon his personal qual- 
ities. External life was growing more refined in all particulars : 
the man of society was created ; rules for civilized men were 
made ; and there was an increasing desire for sumptuous, artistic 
entertainments. The mediaeval idea of existence was turned 
upside down ; men who had hitherto turned their thoughts exclu- 
sively to heavenly things and believed exclusively in the divine 
right, now began to think about beautifying their earthly exist- 
ence ; of making it happy and gay ; and returned to a belief in 
their human rights. This was a great advance, but one which 
carried with it the seeds of many dangers. 



54 THE RENAISSANCE 

" The conception of artistic development best known to us," says 
Henry Vandyke, Jr., "most generally studied and widely ad- 
mired, is the Italian Renaissance, a period which produced at once 
the most beautiful paintings and the most corrupt men the world 
has ever seen. Was it art then that destroyed Italy, filled her 
with horrible corruption and degraded her in the age of the Re- 
naissance ? Or, was it not rather something else that first de- 
stroyed Italy itself, and then Italian art, — a false worldly church, 
a religion enslaved and polluted by the traditions of men, a selfish 
political system which threw unlimited power into the hands of 
soldiers, nobles and merchant-princes ? These were the influences 
which wrought the downfall of Italy, and with her fall her 
promising art." 

' ' Italy, ' ' says Mr. Symonds, in his History of Italian literature, 
4 • after receiving the lamp of learning from the hands of Hell in 
the days of her own freedom, now, in the times of her adversity, 
gave it to the North. She was the divinely appointed birth-place 
of the modern spirit, the workshop of knowledge for all Europe, 
our mistress in the arts and sciences, the Alma Mater of our stu- 
dent years, the well-spring of mental freedom after ages of 
stagnation. At the very outset of the era in which we live and 
play our parts, Italy embraced all philosophy, all science, all art, 
all discovery alone." 

Thus the conception of morality became gradually weaker : 
The "fay ce que vouldras" — do as you please — of Rabelais, who 
lived from 1495 to 1553 — became the first principle of life. Reli- 
gious feeling was blunted, was weakened, was changed, and it 
became Pagan again. Finally, the Italian of the Renaissance, 
in his qualities and passions, became the most remarkable repre- 
sentative of the heights and depths of the virtues and faults of 
humanity. Corruption was associated with all that is most ideal 
in life ; a profound skepticism took hold of peoples' minds ; 
indifference to good and evil alike reached its highest point. 

§ 21. Development of the Renaissance. 

Romantic poems were the product of the moral skepticism and 
the artistic taste of the fifteenth century. Italy never had any 
true epic poetry in its period of literary birth. Still less could it 
have any in the Renaissance. It had, however, many poems 
called Cantari, because they contained stories that were sung to 
the people ; and besides these, there were romantic poems, such 



ARISOTO AND TASSO 55 

as the Buovo d y Antona, the Regina Ancrossa ; and others. But 
the first to introduce elegance and a new life into this style was 
Luigi Pulci — 1 43 2- 1 490 — who grew up in the house of the 
Medici, and who wrote the Morgante Maggio?-e, at the request of 
Lucrezia, mother of Lorenzo, the Magnificent. Pulci 's merit 
consists in having been the first to raise the Romantic Epic, which 
had been for two centuries in the hands of story-tellers, into a 
work of art, and in having united the comic and the serious, thus 
happily depicting the manners and feelings of the time. With a 
more serious intention Matteo Maria Boiardo, Count of Scandiano, 
wrote his Orlando Iimamorato, in which he seemed to aspire to 
embrace the whole race of Carlovingian legends ; but he did not 
live to complete his task. We find here, too, a large vein of 
humor and burlesque. Still the Ferrarese is drawn to the world 
of Romance by a profound sympathy for chivalrous manners and 
feelings, that is to say, for love, courtesy, and generosity. He 
lived from 1434 to 1494. 

§ 22. Ariosto. 

Ariosto's Orlando Furioso was a continuation of the Boiardo 's 
Innamorato. His characteristic is that he assimilated the romance 
of chivalry to the style of the novels of classicism. Ariosto was 
an artist only for the love of his art. His sole aim was to make 
a romance that should please the generation in which he lived. 
His Orlando has no grace or serious purpose ; on the contrary, it 
creates a fantastic world, in which the poet rambles, indulging 
'his caprice, and sometimes smiling at his own work. His great 
design is to depict everything with the greatest possible perfec- 
tion : the cultivation of style is what occupies him most. In his 
hands the style becomes wonderfully plastic to every conception 
of grace, variety and harmony. Ariosto lived from 1474 to 1533. 

The golden age of the Renaissance, as we have seen, is reck- 
oned from the taking of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453 till 
the death of Ariosto, 1533, a period of eighty years. 

§ 23. Tasso. 

Tasso was born about eleven years after the death of Ariosto. 
The desire to put this poet b}^ the side of Ariosto, as if he be- 
longed to the same school, or at least to the same literary period, 
has been the cause of many mistaken judgments. He lived 
entirely in the serene world of art, in the blessed contemplation 



56 THE RENAISSANCE 

of the beautiful, in the midst of the absolute religious indifference 
of the Renaissance. Tasso, on the contrary, lived when the Re- 
formation, triumphant in Germany, was changing the face of the 
world, and obliging the Catholic Church to modify and correct 
itself, and to struggle against the menacing enemy. He would 
never have dared to speak of the Popes as Ariosto had done, or as 
so many Italian writers of the Renaissance had likewise done. 
He was even tormented by persistent religious scruples, which 
operated not a little as sources of his madness. Such sources, 
could never have tormented Ariosto. 

" Tasso," as Carducci has well said, " is the legitimate heir of 
Dante. He believes, and reasons in his faith by philosophy ; he 
loves and comments on his love in a learned style ; he is an artist 
and writes dialogues of scholastic speculation that would fain be 
Platonic." He was only eighteen years old when, in 1562, he 
tried his hand at epic poetry, and wrote Rifialdo, in which he tried 
to reconcile the Aristotelian rules with the variety of Ariosto. 
He afterwards wrote the Arminta, & pastoral drama of exquisite 
taste. But the work to which he had long turned his thoughts 
was an heroic poem, and that absorbed all his powers. He him- 
self explains what his^intention was in his three Discorsi, written 
while he was composing the Gerusalemme : he would choose a 
great and wonderful subject, not so ancient as to have lost all its 
interest, nor so recent as to prevent the poet from embellishing it 
with invented circumstances ; he meant to treat it vigorously ac- 
cording to the rules of writers of action, observed in Greek and 
Latin poems, but with a far greater variety and splendor of 
episodes, so that in this point it should not fall short of the 
romantic poem ; and, finally, he would write it in a lofty and or- 
nate style. This is what Tasso has done in his Gerusalemme 
Liberata, the subject of which is the liberating of the tomb of 
Christ in the eleventh century by Godfrey of Bouillon. The poet; 
does not follow faithfully all the historical facts, but he sets before 
us the principal causes of them, bringing in the supernatural 
agency of God and Satan. The Gerusalemme is the best heroic 
poem that Italy can show : it approaches to classical perfection. 
Its episodes, above all, are most beautiful. There is profound feel- 
ing in it, and everything reflects the melancholy soul of the poet. 
As regards the style, however, although Tasso studiously endeav- 
ored to keep close to the classic models, one cannot help noticing^ 
that he makes excessive use of metaphors, of antitheses, of far- 



ITALY DURING THE RENAISSANCE 57 

fetched conceits ; and it is especially from this point of view, that 
some historians have placed Tasso in the literary period, generally 
known under the name of " Secentisimo," and that others, more 
moderate in their criticisms, have said that he prepared the way 
for it. 

§ 24. Italy during the Renaissance. 

At the end of the fifteenth century, Italy was the centre of 
European civilization : while the other nations were still plunged 
in a feudal barbarism, which seems almost as far removed from 
all our sympathies as is the condition of some American or Poly- 
nesian savages, the Italians appear to us as possessing habits of 
thought, a mode of life, political and social, and literary institu- 
tions not unlike those of to-day ; as men whom we can thoroughly 
understand ; whose ideas and aims, whose general views, resemble 
our own in that main indefinable characteristic of being modern. 
They had shaken off the morbid monastic ways of feeling ; they 
had thrown aside the crooked scholastic modes of thinking ; 
they had trampled under foot the feudal institutions of the Middle 
Ages ; no symbolical mist made them see things vague, strange, 
and distorted ; their intellectual atmosphere was as clear as our 
own ; and if they saw less than we do, what they did see appeared 
to them in its true shape and proportions. Almost for the first 
time since the ruin of antique civilization, they could show well- 
organized states ; artistically disciplined armies ; rationally devised 
laws ; rationally conducted agriculture ; and widely extended intel- 
ligently undertaken commerce. For the first time, also, they 
showed regularly built, healthy, and commodious towns; well- 
drained fields ; and more important than all, hundreds of miles of 
country, owned not by feudal lords, but by citizens ; cultivated not 
by serfs, but by free peasants. While in the rest of Europe, men 
were floundering about among the stagnant ideas and crumbling 
institutions of the effete Middle Ages, with but a vague half- 
consciousness of their own nature, the Italians walked calmly 
through a life as well arranged as their great towns, bold, inquis- 
itive, and sceptical : modern administrators, modern soldiers, 
modern politicians, modern financiers, scholars, and thinkers. 
Towards the end of the fifteenth century Italy seemed to have 
obtained the philosophic, literary, aid artistic inheritance of 
Greece ; the administrative, legal, and military inheritance of 
Rome, increased threefold by her own strong, original, essentially 
modern activities. 



58 THE RENAISSANCE 

Yet, at this very time, and almost in proportion as all these ad- 
vantages developed, the moral vitality of the Italians was rapidly 
decreasing, and a horrible moral gangrene was beginning to 
spread : liberty was extinguished ; public good faith seemed to be 
dying out ; even private morality nickered ominously ; every free 
State became subject to a despot, always unscrupulous and often 
infamous ; warfare became a mere pretext for the rapine and ex- 
tortions of mercenaries ; diplomacy grew to be a mere swindle ; 
the humanists inoculated literature with the filthiest refuse cast 
up by antiquity ; nay, even civic and family ties were loosened ; 
assassinations and patricides began to abound ; and all law, 
human and divine, to be set at defiance. 

The nations, which came in contact with the Italians, opened 
their eyes with astonishment, with mingled admiration and terror ; 
and we, people of the nineteenth century, are filled with the same 
feeling, only much stronger and more defined, as we watch the 
strange ebullition of the Renaissance, seething with the good and 
the bad, as we contemplate the enigmatic picture drawn by the 
puzzled historian, the picture of a people moving on towards civ- 
ilization and towards chaos. Our first feeling is perplexity; our 
second feeling, anger ; we do not know, at first, whether we 
ought to believe in such an anomaly ; and when once we do be- 
lieve in it, we are indignant at its existence. We accuse these 
Italians of the Renaissance of having wilfully and shamefully 
perverted their own powers ; of having wantonly corrupted their 
own civilization ; of having cynically destroyed their own national 
existence ; and of having boldly called down the vengeance of 
Heaven. We lament and we accuse, naturally enough, but per- 
haps not justly. 

But let us ask ourselves what the Renaissance really was, and 
what was its use ; how it was produced ; and how it necessarily 
ended. Let us try to understand its inherent nature, and the 
nature of what surrounded it, which, taken together, constitute 
its inevitable fate ; let us seek the explanation of that strange, 
anomalous civilization — that life in death and death in life. 

The Renaissance, inasmuch as it is something we can define, 
and not a mere vague name for a certain epoch, is not a period, 
but a condition ; and if we apply the word to any period in par- 
ticular, it is because in it that condition was peculiarly marked. 
The Renaissance may be defined as being that phase in mediaeval 
history in which the double influence, feudal and ecclesiastical, 



ITAI.Y DURING THE RENAISSANCE 59 

which had gradual^ crushed the spontaneous life of the early 
mediaeval revival and reduced all to a dead, sterile mass, was 
neutralized by the existence of democratic and secular communi- 
ties ; that phase in which, while there existed not as yet any large 
nations, or any definite national feeling, there existed free towns 
and civic democracies. In this sense, the Renaissance began to 
exist with the earliest mediaeval revival, but its peculiar mission 
could be carried out only when the general revival had come to 
an end. In this sense, also, the Renaissance did not exist all over 
Italy, and it existed outside of Italy ; but in Italy it was far more 
universal, than elsewhere : there it was the rule ; elsewhere it was 
the exception. There was no Renaissance in Savoy, nor in Naples, 
nor even in Rome ; but north of the Alps there was a Renais- 
sance. * * * Vernon Lee. 



The Spaniards then came to Italy, and the Germans likewise : 
strong mediaeval nations, like the French, with the creative power 
of the Middle Ages still in them, refreshed by the long rest of the 
dull fifteenth century. But the Spaniards and Germans came as 
mere greedy, besotten, and savage mercenaries : the scum of 
their own countries, careless of Italian sights and deeds, thinking 
only of torturing for hidden treasure or swilling southern wines ; 
and they returned to Spain and to Germany, to persecutions of 
Moriscos and the plundering of abbeys, as savage and as dull as 
they had arrived. A smattering of Italian literature, art and 
manners, was carried back to Spain and Germany, by Spanish and 
German princes and governors, to be transmitted to a few cour- 
tiers and humanists ; but the imagination of the lower classes of 
Spain and Germany, absorbed in the Quixotic Catholicism of 
Loyola, and the Biblical contemplations of Luther, never came into 
fertilizing contact with the decaying Italy of the Renaissance. 

The invasions had exhausted themselves ; the political organi- 
zation of Italy was definitely broken up ; its material wealth was 
exhausted ; the French, Germans and Spaniards had come and 
gone, and returned and gone again: they had left nothing to 
annex or to pillage, when about the middle of the sixteenth cen- 
tury, the country began to be overrun by a new horde of barba- 
rians, the English. The English came neither as invaders nor as 
marauders : they were peaceable students and rich noblemen, who, 
so far from trying to extort money or annex territory, rather prof- 



60 THE RENAISSANCE 

ited the ruined Italians by the work which they did and the money 
which they squandered. Yet these quiet and profitable travellers, 
before whom the Italians might safely display their remaining 
wealth, were in reality as covetous of the possessions of Italy, 
and as resolute to return home enriched as any tattered Gascon 
men-at-arms, gluttonous Swiss or grinding Spaniards. They 
were, one and all, consciously and unconsciously, dragged to 
Italy by the irresistible instinct that Italy possessed that which 
they required : by the greed of intellectual gain, that which they 
thus instinctively knew Italy possessed. That which they must 
obtain was a mode of thought, a habit of form, philosophy, art, 
civilization, and, in truth, all the materials for intellectual manip- 
ulation. For in the sixteenth century, on awakening from its 
long evil sleep, haunted by the nightmare of the civil war of the 
fifteenth century, the English mind had started up in the vigor of 
well-nigh mature youth, fed and rested by the long inactivity in 
which it had slept through its period of growth. It had awak- 
ened at the first touch of foreign influence. 

§ 25. Painting and the Renaissa?ice . 
The Renaissance, let us remember, was merely the flowering 
time of that great mediaeval movement, which had germinated 
early in the twelfth century. It was merely a more advanced 
stage of the civilization which had produced Dante and Giotto : 
of the civilization which was destined to produce a Luther and a 
Rabelais. The fifteenth century was merely the continuation of 
the fourteenth century, as the fourteenth had been of the thir- 
teenth ; there had been growth and improvement — the develop- 
ment of the more modern, the diminishing of the more mediaeval 
elements ; but despite of growth and changes due to growth, the 
Renaissance was part and parcel of the Middle Ages. The life, 
thought, aspiration and habits were mediaeval, opposed to the 
open-air life, the physical training and materialistic religion of 
antiquity. The surroundings of Masaccio and Signorelli, nay 
even of Raphael, were very different from those of Phidias and 
Praxiteles. Let us think of what were the daily and hourly im- 
pressions given by the Renaissance to its artists : large towns, in 
which thousands of human beings were crowded together in nar- 
row, gloomy streets, with but a strip of the blue heavens visible 
between the projecting roofs ; and in these cities, an incessant 
commercial activity, with no relief save festivals at the churches ; 



PAINTING AND THE RENAISSANCE 61 

brawls at the taverns ; and bad carnival buffooneries ; men and 
women, pale and meagre for the want of air and light and move- 
ment ; undeveloped, untrained bodies, warped by constant work at 
the loom or at the desk : at best, with the lumpish freedom of the 
soldier or the vulgar nimbleness of the prentice . And these men and 
women dressed in the dress of the Middle Ages, gorgeous perhaps in 
color, but heavy, miserable, grotesque, nay, sometimes ludicrous 
in form ; citizens in lumpish robes and long-tailed caps ; ladies in 
stiff and folded brocade hoops and stomachers ; artizans in striped 
and close-adhering hose, and egg-shaped, padded jerkins ; soldiers 
in lumbering armor-plates, ill -fitted over ill-fitting leather, a 
shapeless shell of iron, bulging out and angular, in which the 
body was buried as successfully as in the robes of the magistrates . 

Thus we see the men and women of the Renaissance in the 
works of all its painters ; heavy in Ghirlandago, vulgarly jaunty 
in Filippino, preposterously undignified in Signorelli ; while me- 
diaeval stiffness, awkardness, and absurdity reach their acme, 
perhaps, in the little boys, companions of the Medici children, 
introduced into Benozzo Gozzoli's Building of Babel. These are 
prosperous townsfolk among whom the Renaissance artist is but 
too glad to seek for models. But besides these, there are lament- 
able sights, mediseval beyond words, at every street corner, 
dwarfs and cripples, maimed and diseased beggars of all degrees 
of loathsomeness ; lepers and epileptics ; and infinite numbers of 
monks, brown, grey, and black, in sack-shaped frocks and pointed 
hoods, with shaven crown and cropped beard, emaciated with 
penance or bloated with gluttony. And all this the painter sees 
daily, hourly ; it is his standard of humanity, and as such finds 
its way into every picture. It is the living, but opposite to it 
arises the dead. 

Let us, however, turn aside from the crowd of the mediseval 
city, and look at what the workmen have just laid bare, or what 
the merchant has just brought home from Rome or from Greece. 
Look at this : it is corroded by oxides, battered by ill-usage, 
stained with earth ; it is not a group, not even a whole statue ; 
it has neither head nor arms remaining ; it is a mere broken frag- 
ment of antique sculpture ; a naked body with a fold or two of 
drapery ; it is not by Phidias or Praxiteles ; it may not even be a 
Greek ; it may be some cheap copy, made for a garden or a bath, 
in the days of Hadrian . But to the artist of the fifteenth century 
it is the revelation of a whole world, a world in itself. We can 



62 THE RENAISSANCE 

scarcely realize all this ; but let us look and reflect, and even we 
may feel as must have felt the man in the Renaissance, in the 
presence of that mutilated, stained, battered torso. He sees in 
that broken stump a grandeur of outline, a magnificence of 
osseous structure, a breadth of muscle and sinew, a smooth, firm 
covering of flesh, such as he would vainly seek in any of his 
living models ; he sees a delicate and infinite variety of indentures, 
of projections, of creases following the bend of every limb ; he 
sees, where the surface still exists intact, an elasticity of skin, a 
buoyancy of hidden life, such as all the colors of his palette are 
unable to imitate; and on this piece of drapery, negligently 
gathered over the hips, or rolled upon the arm, he sees a magnifi- 
cent alteration of large folds and straight lines, and broken lines 
and curves. He sees all this, but he sees more : the broken torso 
is, as we have said, not merely a world in itself, but the revela- 
tion of a world. It is the revelation of antique civilization, of 
the palaestra and the stadium ; of the sanctification of the body ; 
of the apotheosis of man ; of the religion of life, of nature and 
of joy, revealed to the man of the Middle Ages, who has hitherto 
seen in the untrained, diseased, despised body but a deformed 
piece of baseness, which his priests tell him belongs to the worms 
and Satan ; to the man who has been taught that the monk, living 
in solitude and celibacy, filthy, sick, worn-out with fastings and 
bleeding with flagellations, is the nearest approach to divinity; 
to the individual who has seen Divinity itself, pale, emaciated, 
joyless, hanging bleeding from the Cross ; and who is forever re- 
minded that the kingdom of this godhead is not of this world. 

What passes in the mind of that artist? What surprise, what 
dawning doubts, what sickening fears, what longings and remorse, 
are not the fruit of this sight of antiquity ? Is he to yield or to 
resist ? Is he to forget the saints and Christ, and give himself 
over to Satan and antiquity? Only one man boldly answered, Yes. 
Mantegna — 1 431-1506 — abjured his faith, abjured the Middle 
Ages, abjured all that belonged to his time, and in so doing cast 
away from him the living art, and became the lover and the 
worshipper of shadows. 

And only one man again turned completely aside from the Antique 
and from the demon, and that man was a saint, Fra Angelico da 
Fiesole, that is, Guido — 1387-1455 . Montegna is the learned man, 
the archaeological, the pagan, who renounces his times and his 
faith ; and Angelico the monk, the saint, who shuts and bolts his 



PAINTING AND THE RENAISSANCE 63 

monastery doors and sprinkles holy water on the face of the Antique. 
The two extremes are both exceptions. The innumerable artists of 
the Renaissance remained in hesitation ; tried to count both the 
Antique and the Modern; to unite the Pagan and the Christian. 
Some, like Ghirlandago — 1449- 1494 — in cold indifference to all 
but mere artistic science, encrusting marble bacchanals into walls 
of the Virgin's paternal house; bringing together, unthinkingly, 
antique -draped women carrying baskets ; and noble Strozzi and 
Rucellai ladies with gloved hands, folded over their golden bro- 
caded skirts ; others with cheerful and childlike pleasure in both 
antique and modern, like Benozzo, crowding together half-naked 
youths and nymphs, treading the grapes and scaling the trellis ; with 
Florentine magnificas, in plaited skirts and starched collars, out 
among the pines or on the porticos ; the sprawling children, bark- 
ing dogs, peacocks sunning themselves, and partridges picking at 
grains on his frescoes; and yet others, using the antique as mere 
pageant shows, allegorical mummeries, destined to amuse some 
Duke of Ferrara or Marquis of Mantua, together with hurdle 
races of Jews, hags and riderless donkeys. * * * 

Coarse, rude, stiff drapery, or vulgar attitude, was all the fif- 
teenth century could afford to its artists ; but antiquity could offer 
more and very different things : the naked body developed by the 
most artistic training; drapery the most natural and refined, and 
attitude and gesture regulated by an education the most careful 
and artistic ; and all these things antiquity gave to the artists of 
the Renaissance. They did not copy antique statues as living, 
naked men and women, but they corrected the faults of their liv- 
ing models by the example of the statues. They did not copy 
antique stone draperies on colored pictures, but they arranged the 
robes on their models with the antique folds well in their memory ; 
they did not give the gestures of statues to living figures, but they 
made the living figures move in accordance with those principles 
of harmony which they had found exemplified in the statues. 

They did not imitate the Antique : they studied it ; they obtained 
through the fragments of antique sculpture a glimpse into the life 
of antiquity ; and that glimpse served to correct the vulgarism and 
distortion of the mediaeval life of the fifteenth century. In the 
perfection of Italian painting, the union of antique and modern 
being consummated, it is perhaps difficult to disentangle what 
really is antique from what is modern ; but in the earlier times, 
when the two elements were still separate, we can tell them opposite 



64 ' THE RENAISSANCE 

each other, and compare them in the works of the greatest artists. 
Wherever, in the paintings of the early Renaissance, there is 
realism, marked by the costume of the times, there is ugliness of 
form and vulgarity of movement; where there is idealism, marked 
by imitation of the ancient, the nude, and drapery, there is beauty 
and dignity. We need only compare Filippino's scene with his 
raising of the King's Son in the Brancacci Chapel ; the grand at- 
titude and draperies of Ghirlandago's Zachariah with the vulgar 
dress and movements of the Florentine citizens surrounding 
him. * * * 

The antique perfected the art of the Renaissance ; it did not 
corrupt it. The art of the Renaissance fell indeed into shameful 
degradation soon after the period of its triumphant union with the 
Antique, and Raphael's grand gods and goddesses, his exquisite 
Bros and radiant Psyche of the Farresina, are indeed succeeded 
but too soon by the Olympus of Girilio Romano — 1492-1546 — an 
Olympus of harlots and acrobats, who smirk and mouth and wriggle 
and sprawl on the walls and ceilings of the dismantled palace, which 
crumble away among the stunted willows, the stagnant pools, and 
rank grass of the marshes of Mantua. But this is no more the 
fault of antiquity than it is the fault of the Middle Ages : it is 
the fault of that great principle of life and of change, which 
makes all things organic, be they physical or intellectually ger- 
minate, grow, attain maturity, and then fade, wither and rot. 
The dead art of antiquity could never have brought the art of the 
Renaissance to an untimely end : the art of the Renaissance de- 
cayed because it was mature, and died because it had lived. . 



If the elements of painting, perspective, action, background, 
and even light and shade and color, had not been necessarily 
generated in the corruption of sculpture, the civilization of me- 
diaeval Italy, so essentially favorable to painting, would never 
have produced it : those pictorial elements would not have devel- 
oped had they been cast into a different civilization from that in 
which they were cast, but without fruit, into the Arabian civili- 
zation ; but, although the democratic and industrious communi- 
ties, the mystic religion, and the violent life of mediaeval Italy 
and Flanders were required to develop the pictorial art germ, the 
frescoes of Giotto and the panels of Van Eyck would neither 



PAINTING AND THE RENAISSANCE 65 

have existed, if the debased sculptors of falling Rome had not 
violated every sculptural law in their abominable pictorially con- 
ceived statues and bas-reliefs. For the germs of one art are set 
free in the corruption and disintegration of its predecessor ; as 
soon as the old art has lost its vitality and homogeneousness ; 
and as soon as the civilization, favorable to its existence, has dis- 
solved, those germs develop, fostered by a new civilization, into 
a new art organism, which grows, matures, decays, corrupts, and 
in its disintegration, sets free the art-seed once more in a modified 
form, and dying gives birth to a cognate but different art. Thus 
the legitimate efforts of a new art will follow upon the impotent 
cravings of an old art ; what architecture tried vainly to do, be- 
cause it could no longer do its own work, is done by sculpture; 
what sculpture hankered after, when it was morbid, is the healthy 
employment of painting ; what was attempted by painting in its 
death delirium, is accomplished by music in its mature strength. 
Early antiquity will produce architecture, which contains the 
embryo of sculpture and painting in the moldings of its columns 
and the designs of its walls ; later antiquity will produce sculp- 
ture ; the Middle Ages will produce sculptural architecture ; the 
Renaissance will produce painting; the seventeenth and eigh- 
teenth centuries will produce music ; and the various forms of 
literature will follow each other in the same manner. * * * 
— Vernon L,ee. 

It has often been remarked that the schools of painting, in which 
color has been predominant, have been the great naturalistic school 8 
as well, and there have been various speculations as to the cause 
of this fact. Ruskin's theory, that the production of beautiful 
color requires an absolute fidelity to nature, any deviation from 
natural facts, introducing a discordant note and so ruining the 
color-harmony, certainly seems untenable. Would it not be truer 
to say that beautiful color permits fidelity to nature ? There seems 
to be in the human mind a natural shrinking from bare hard fact. 
The absolute truth of things, as they are, needs no softening of 
angles or hiding of ugliness. Mother Isis — without her veil — 
would be intolerable to us. The schools of color restore her veil 
to Nature and wrap her in the mystery of atmosphere; they 
charm us with deep, vague harmonies, and entice the imagination 
into impenetrable shadows. With them everything is mysterious 
and, therefore, nothing is shocking. They can afford to give us 
6 



66 THE RENAISSANCE 

the facts of nature, because they give them to us as they are in 
nature, although mitigated. But the schools of the line strip 
nature of her atmosphere and of her color. With them every- 
thing is hard, dry, and defined; and they feel instinctively that the 
least ugliness — the least falling short of real beauty — would be- 
come unbearable under their white light. They cannot bear the 
least defect, the least commonness, the least naturalness of nature, 
but refine upon and polish their forms, finding nothing pure or 
noble enough for them, and forever missing the rough grandeur 
and homely bearing of this every-day world, which is constantly 
to their hand. 

If it is, then, so difficult to avoid the matter of fact in painting, 
which deals only with appearances, think how much more diffi- 
cult it is in sculpture, which deals with actual substance. It is 
not a representation of form, it is form. It is itself aufait. This 
is the great problem: How is the sculptor, with his stubborn 
material of solid stone or massive bronze, to avoid the stumbling- 
block of too great reality ? 

There have been three great schools of sculpture which have 
differed widely in the solution of this problem. The Greeks may 
be compared to the schools of form in painting — what are known 
as the classic schools. They sought relief from the hard facts of 
nature in nobly ideal forms, abstracted from all accident and all 
individuality. They could not give the mystery and infinitude of 
nature, and they could not give the material imperfections of 
things divested of nature's mystery. They, therefore, formulated 
an ideal of what nature ought to be, of what seemed to them the 
primal type, freed from the thousand variations of its actual car- 
rying out; and this ideal once established, they adhered to it 
rightly. Their answer to the problem is abstraction. The sculp- 
tors of the Renaissance before Michael Angelo, gave another 
answer, which we will discuss at length later on. Michael Angelo 
gave a third answer. Although his towering and colossal genius 
can never be sufficiently revered, yet he was technically less ac- 
complished than either the Greeks or the earlier Renaissance 
sculptors, and did not understand either the glorious purity of the 
Greek ideal nor the system of delicate half-modelling of his im- 
mediate predecessors. He had an idea of his own, but it is 
rugged, Titanic, imperfect, lacking the serene Greek beauty and 
the delicate Renaissance suggestiveness. Such of his marbles as 
are finished have a certain unsatisfactoriness, which he seems to 



PAINTING AND THE RENAISSANCE 67 

have felt himself. His answer to our problem — not an altogether 
finished one — is, tmfinisked. 

The answer of the Renaissance sculptors was lozvness of relief. 
They are the colorists of sculpture. Their aim w r as to give some- 
thing which should answer to the atmosphere and the mystery of 
painting, and so be enabled to give it variety, individuality and 
naturalness also. To do this, still working more or less uncon- 
sciously as artists do, and probably without analyzing their aims 
and processes, they invented and carried out a system of low 
relief, which is one of the loveliest and most perfect means of 
artistic expression that has ever existed. Of course the Greeks 
had used bas-reliefs, and had used them exquisitely; but their 
reliance, even in their medals, is upon the same quality of large 
abstraction and generalization as in their statues, not as in the 
Renaissance work, upon suggestiveness or vagueness, and its ac- 
companying naturalism and individuality. There are Italian 
reliefs, which are almost inconceivable in the delicacy of the mod- 
elling. They seem hardly more than sketched with slight touches 
of shadow upon the marble. The relief is so infinitessimal, the 
modelling so subtle, that they seem hardly to exist; and one fears 
to obliterate them with a careless brush of the hand, as one might a 
slight classical drawing. They are not form, but the merest sugges- 
tion of form, faint and vague, and as fleeting as a beautiful dream. 

But these wonderful men did not stop here. Having perfected 
their system of low relief, they applied it to sculpture, in the 
round. In their busts, in their statues, they still model as it were 
in low relief. Nothing is made out, nothing is realized : the in- 
tention is indicated and that is all. The hollows are not as deep 
as in nature, nor the projections as high. The hand of the sculp- 
tor has paused, with delicate self-control, just before the suggested 
form was quite completed, and left the rest to the imagination. 
This is no lack of finish, as with Michael Angelo. No, the surfaces 
are caressed into beauty with an infinity of loving care. It is an 
intentional stopping sh6rt of complete realization : it is lowness of 
relief. This application of low relief to sculpture, in the round, 
is the great discovery of the sculptors in the Renaissance. They 
had learned how to give nature with its mystery and its atmos- 
phere : how to give, not form but the appearance of form. They 
cast a thin veil over the hard facts of nature, which the imagina- 
tion delighted to penetrate. 

Their reward was a nearness to natural truth, which the Greeks 
could not dream of. No art gives us such an invigorating sense 



68 THE RENAISSANCE 

of freshness, of inspiration, as this. "The world is all before them, 
where to choose;" as they realize no facts, they can suggest all ; 
through the veil of their illusive modelling they can show us the 
infinite variety and individuality of nature; and Antseus-like, they 
rise with renewed strength from their constant contact with 
mother earth. They are no longer bound to a definite type of 
ideal beauty, but can wander at will among the thousand acci- 
dental graces and half-awkward beauties of human beings. They 
give us not a magnificent abstract conception of Olympus, but an 
endlessly delightful portrait of the world we live in. 

In lowness of relief have we not found at last the true answer 
to our problem ? It is hard to say that this art is greater than 
Greek art, but is it not more human? Does it not appeal more 
closely to our human nature ? Does it not instruct and charm us 
more? It has the charm of the "intimate." How quaint, how 
sincere, how naif those old Florentines were ! With what wide- 
open, truth-seeing eyes they looked at the universe, and with 
what manly simplicity and frankness they recorded what they 
saw ! What a vital, living art! Every one of their statues is a 
portrait: one has but to look at it to be convinced of that. So, 
and not otherwise, must the real original have looked. Many of 
their best works are professed portraits, and their living quality is 
extraordinary. Look at the Count Delia Luna, for example, or 
Mino da Fiesole's "Warrior" — 1466 — or the "Young Clerk," or 
the ' ' Lady with the Rose. ' ' Look at any of the portrait-busts by 
these men. Can fidelity, truth, vitality be carried further? Are 
not these very people alive before you? Do you not feel an inti- 
mate acquaintance with them — a profound conviction that you 
must have met them yesterday? Do you not love the women, 
and admire or hate the men ? 

But the concentration and quintessence of Renaissance art is in 
that masterpiece of an unknown hand, known and loved by all 
artists as the Fenime Inconnue of the Louvre. Here are the low- 
ness and vagueness of relief, the floating, undefined modelling, 
the delicate finish of surfaces, the exquisite modulation and 
subtile curvature of line, the frank simplicity of aim, and the in- 
dividuality and vitality of the whole, all in their utmost perfec- 
tion. What a work of art! and, O ye gods, what a woman! 
There she is as she lived in Florence four centuries ago, with her 
daintily poised head in its demure cap, her slender, graceful neck 
and half-developed breasts, her bewitching eyes, and her inde- 
finable evanescent smile, a very pearl of women ! 



THE CATHOLIC COUNTER-REFORMATION 69 

She lived in Florence centuries ago, 

That lady smiling there. 
What was her name or rank I do not know — 

I know that she was fair. 

For some great man — his name like her's forgot, 

And faded from men's sight — 
Loved her — he mu$t have loved her — and has wrought 

This bust for our delight. 

Whether he gained her love or had her scorn, 

Full happy was his fate. 
He saw her, heard her speak ; he was not born 

Four hundred years too late ! — Kenyon Cox. 

§ 26. The Catholic Coimter- Reformation. 

The German Reformation was incapable of propagating itself in 
Italy, chiefly for the reason that the intellectual forces, which it 
represented and employed, had already found specific outlet in 
that country. It was not in the nature of the Italians, skeptical 
and paganized by the Revival of Letters, to be keenly interested 
about questions which seemed to revive the scholastic disputes of 
the Middle Ages. It was not in their external conditions, suffer- 
ing, as they were, from invasions and enthralled by despots, to 
use the Reformation as a lever for political revolution. Yet when 
a tumultuous army of so-called Lutherans sacked Rome in 1527, 
no sober thinker doubted that a new agent had appeared in 
Europe, which would alter the destinies of the Peninsula. The 
Renaissance was virtually closed so far as it concerned Italy, 
when Clement VII and Charles V struck their compact at Bologna 
in 1530. This contract proclaimed the principle of Monarchical 
Absolutism, supported by Papal authority, itself monarchically 
absolute, which influenced Europe until the outbreak of the Ref- 
ormation. A reaction immediately set in both against the Re- 
naissance and the Reformation. The Council of Trent, opened in 
1545 and closed in 1563, decreed a formal purgation of the Church ; 
affirmed the fundamental doctrines of Catholicism ; strengthened 
the Papal supremacy ; and inaugurated that movement of resist- 
ance which is known as the Counter- Reformation. The complex 
onward effort of the modern nations, expressing itself in Italy as 
the Renaissance, in Germany as the Reformation, had now aroused 
the forces of Conservatism. The four main instruments of the 
reaction were the Papacy, which had done so much by its sympa- 
thy with the Revival of Letters to promote the humanistic spirit 



70 THK RKNAISSANCK 

it now dreaded; the strength of Spain, and the two Spanish insti- 
tutions planted on Roman soil, the Inquisition, and the Order of 
Jesus. The principles contended for and established by this re- 
action was absolutism as opposed to freedom , monarchical abso- 
lutism, papal absolutism, and the suppression of energies liberated 
by the Renaissance and the Reformation . 

§ 27. Spain. 

The part played by Spain at this juncture was determined in a 
large measure by external circumstances. The Spaniards became 
one nation by the conquest of Granada, and the union of the 
crowns of Castile and Aragon. The war of national aggrandize- 
ment, being in its nature a crusade, inflamed the religious enthu- 
siasm of the people. It was followed by the expulsion of the 
Jews and Moors, and by the establishment of the Inquisition on a 
solid basis, with powers formidable to the freedom of all Spaniards, 
from the peasant to the throne. These facts explain the decisive 
action of the Spanish nation on the side of Catholic conservatism, 
and help us to understand how their brilliant achievements in the 
field of culture during the sixteenth century were speedily fol- 
lowed by stagnation. 

What has specially to be noted, regarding the progress of the 
Spanish race in arts and letters at this epoch, is their potent national 
originality. The Revival of Learning produced in Spain no slavish 
imitation as it did in Italy, no formal humanism, and it may be 
added, very little fruitful scholarship. The Renaissance here, as. 
in England, displayed essential qualities of intellectual freedom, 
delight in life, exultation over re-discovered earth and man. The 
note of Renascence-work in Germany was still Gothic. This we feel 
in the penetrative earnestness of Diirer, in the homeliness of Hans 
Sachs, in the sombre pregnancy of the Faust legend, the almost 
stolid mastery of Holbein. It lay not in the German genius to 
escape from the preoccupations and limitatations of the Middle 
Ages, for this reason mainly, that what we call mediaeval was to a 
large extent Teutonic. But on the Spanish Peninsula in the 
masterpieces of Cervantes, Camoens, Calderon, we emerge into an 
atmosphere of art definitely national, distinctly modern, where 
solid natural forms stand before us, realistically modelled with light 
and shadow on their rounded outlines, and where the airiest crea- 
tures of the fancy take shape and weave a dance of rhythmic 
light, incomparable and intricate. The Spanish Renaissance would 



SPAIN 71 

in itself suffice, if other witnesses were wanting, to prove how in- 
adequate is the theory that limits this movement to the Revival of 
Learning. Touched by Italian influences, enriched and fortified 
by the New Learning, Spanish genius walked firmly forward on 
its own path. It was only crushed by forces, generated in the 
nation that produced it : by the Inquisition and by despotic 
Cath olic Absolutism . 

In the history of the Renaissance, Spain and Portugal represent 
the exploration of the ocean and the colonization of the Western 
Hemisphere. The voyages of Columbus and Vespucci to America, 
the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope by Diaz, and the discovery 
of the sea-road to India by Vasco da Gama, Cortes' conquest of 
Mexico, and Pizarro's conquest of Peru, marked a new era for the 
human race, and inaugurated the modern age more decisively so 
than any series of advents had done. It has recently been main- 
tained that modern European history is chiefly an affair of com- 
petition between confederated states for the possession of lands 
revealed by Columbus and Vasco da Gama. Without challenging 
or adopting this speculation, we may safely affirm that nothing so 
pregnant of results has happened as this exploration of the globe. 
To say that it displaced the centre of gravity in politics and 
commerce ; substituted the Ocean for the Mediterranean ; dethron- 
ing Italy from her seat of central importance in traffic ; depressing 
the Eastern and elevating the Western powers of Europe ; open- 
ing a path for the Anglo-Saxon expansiveness ; forcing philosophers 
and statesmen to regard the Occidental nations as a single group in 
counterpoise to other groups of nations ; or a European community 
as one unit correlated to other units of humanity upon this planet, 
is truth enough to vindicate the vast significance of these discov- 
eries. The Renaissance, far from being the mere rebirth of 
antiquity with its civilization, confined to the Mediterranean with 
its Hercules' Pillars, beyond which lay Cimmerian darkness, was 
thus effectively the entrance upon a quite incalculably wider 
stage of life, on which mankind at large has since enacted one 
great drama. 

The measure in which the ' ' Divine Comedy ' ' of Dante is writ- 
ten, and of which Dante was in all probability the inventor, has 
received the name of terza rima. It has since been especially 
appropriated to philosophical poetry, to satires and to epistolary 
writing, and allegorical compositions. But it is applicable with 



72 THE RENAISSANCE 

no less success to epic poetry. The position of the recurring 
rhymes keep the attention alive, and admits of a regular flow of 
the narrative, an advantage to which ottava rima, or the stanza of 
the later Italian writers, and even the quatrains of French poetry, 
cannot lay claim. Whatever couplet we may select from the poem 
will afford us, by two of its rhymes, a clue to the preceding passage, 
and by one of them to the following couplet. The verses thus 
interlinked are all endecasyllables, which are exclusively used in 
the epic poetry of Italy ; and they are divided, or supposed to be, 
into five iambics, of which the last is followed by a short syllable. 
The French language, compared with the Italian, is very poor 
in rhymes, which are not easily found for three lines, placed at a 
regular and invariable distance. The rule which compels the 
French writer not to employ two feminine lines in succession, and 
which is not observed in Italian composition, presents an^dditional 
obstacle. It may perhaps also be said that the French language 
has a natural tendency, in its versification to the use of the couplet, 
and that a continued union of rhyme is as repugnant to its genius 
as the running of one line into another. This species of verse is 
also ill-suited for our own language for many of the same reasons. 
It has, however, been employed with considerable success by L,ord 
Bryon in his Prophecy of Dante, as illustrated in the following: 

Many are poets who have never penned 

Their inspiration, and perchance the best: 
They felt, and loved, and died, but would not lend 

Their thoughts to meaner beings : they compressed 
The god within them, and rejoined the stars, 

Unlaurelled upon earth, but far more blest 
Than those who are degraded by the jars 

Of passion, and their frailties linked to fame : 
Conquerors of high renown and full of scars. 

Many are poets but without the name, 

For what is poesy but to create 
From overfeeling good or ill ; and aim 

At an external life beyond our fate, 
And be the new Prometheus of new men, 

Bestowing fire from heaven, and then, too late, 
Finding the pleasure given repaid with pain, 

And, vultures to the heart of the bestower, 
Who having lavished his high gift in vain, 

Ivies chained to his lone rock by the sea-shore ! 
So be it : we can bear — 



PART II 
ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE 



§ 28. The European Races. 

THE Celtic is one of the ancient races, which occupied a great 
part of Central Europe. These people were the early inhabi- 
tants of Italy, Gaul, Spain and Great Britain. In the course of time 
they were conquered by the Romans, and made to form the larger 
part of the Roman Empire ; to conform to the manners of their 
conquerors, and to speak the language of their conquerors. The 
Teutonic Race, originally from Asia, is divided into three branches : 
the first branch contained the High Germans, to which belong the 
Teutonic inhabitants of Upper and Middle Germany, of Switzer- 
land, and of the greater part of the Germans of Hungary; the 
second embraces the Saxons, which is sub-divided into several 
minor branches, including the Old Saxons or Low Germans, the 
Flemish, the Saxons of Transylvania, the English and Scotch; 
and the third or north branch is Scandinavian, to which belong 
the Icelanders, the Norwegians, the Swedes and the Danes. 

§ 29. Britannia. 
The land now called England was not always so called, because 
there were not always Englishmen living in it. The old name of 
the land was Britain, the whole island is still called Great Britain, 
of which England is the southern part and Scotland the northern . 
It is called Great Britain in distinction from another land also 
called Britain, namely, the northwestern corner of Gaul, or France, 
but the latter we generally call Brittany. The two names, how- 
ever, are really the same, and both are called in Latin Britannia. 
What are now called England and Wales were then inhabited by 
Britons, who were of the Celtic race, as were also the inhabitants 
of Ireland, with a marked distinction, however, between them, 
because they were of different families. The British Celts were 
of the Cimbri family, and the Irish Celts were of the Gaelic family. 
Ireland was not so named at that time: it was called Scotia, and 

73 



74 ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE 

Scotland was called Caledonia. Colonists from Scotia, or old 
Ireland, passed over into Caledonia, as the strait between the two 
countries was narrow, and subjected the Picts, Caledonia's earliest 
inhabitants, to their rule, setting over them a king of their own 
people ; and as they gradually gained the ascendancy on the land 
they changed its name from Caledonia to Scotia, and to prevent 
confusion, that island which they had left gradually acquired the 
name of Ireland, or the land of Krin. These Picts in Caledonia 
were also of the Celtic race. 

§ 30. The Roman Conquest. 
The first great invasion of Britain was by the Romans, who after 
having conquered Gaul, passed over the channel and commenced 
their assaults upon the Britons. Julius Caesar crossed over twice 
from Gaul to Britain with his army, but he visited only the south- 
ern part of the island, and he cannot be said to have conquered any 
part of it. It was onl} T in the time of the fourth Emperor Claudius, 
A. D. 43, that some part of the country was at first really con- 
quered. After him his generals, Plautius and Ostorius, who 
captured Caractacus, carried on the war. But the man who at 
last really conquered Britain was Julius Agricola, who was the 
Roman commander in the island from the year 78 to 85. He was 
a good man as well as a brave soldier, and he did all he could to 
civilize the people as well as conquer them. He got farther to the 
north than any Roman general had gone before, and we may say 
that the Roman dominions reached up to the line between the 
Friths of Forth and Clyde in Scotland. This is one of the points 
where the island of Britain is narrowest, and Agricola built a chain 
of forts, that is, a number of small castles, to defend the Roman 
Province against the wild people in the north. He made several 
campaigns farther into Caledonia, as Scotland was then called, 
sailed around north of the island, and discovered the Orkneys, 
which before were hardly known. But the part of Britain north 
of Agricola's forts was never conquered. Except a part of Scot- 
land, however, all Britain was subdued and remained a Roman 
Province for more than 300 years. 

§31. The Introduction of Christianity. 

During all this time, which extended four centuries after the 

birth of Christ, the Christian religion was making its way in the 

world. It is not really known who first preached the Gospel 

in Britain ; but there were Christians in that country in very 



THE ANGLES AND SAXONS 75 

early times, as well as in other parts of the Empire. The first 
Emperor who became a Christian was Constantine; and he is 
said, although perhaps without good foundation, to have been 
born in Britain, and his mother Helen to have been a Briton. It 
is, however, certain that he was proclaimed Emperor in Britain in 
the year A. D. 306, on the death of his father Constantius. After 
his time all the Emperors were Christians except Julian, the 
Apostate, and when they became Christians, the people of the 
Provinces followed their example ; and the whole Empire was con- 
verted . Churches were built and bishoprics founded . It is said that 
there w r ere at an early day three Archbishops in Britain: at London, 
York and Carleon, these being the three large cities of the Island. 

§32. The Angles and Saxons. 

After Britain had been a Roman Province for about three hun- 
dred and fifty years, the Roman power at home became much 
weaker. New r nations began to be heard of, and they were often 
very troublesome to the Empire in different places. The Teutonic 
nations generally had not come under Roman sway. They re- 
mained free. The Romans could never conquer more than a 
small part of Germany ; they never could keep much of the coun- 
try either east of the Rhine or north of the Danube. Towards 
the close of the fourth century there was no longer any fear of the 
Romans conquering the Germans ; on the other hand, the Teutons 
began to press into the Roman Empire. The men of those nations 
were strong and brave, and they had many virtues which the 
Romans had lost. These Teutons by serving in the army, some- 
times with the Romans and sometimes by fighting against them, 
gradually came to be better soldiers than the Romans themselves ; 
and they at last learned to conquer those who had once attempted 
to conquer them. In the fifth century everything in Italy was in 
confusion : Rome itself was sacked by Alaric in the year. 410 
and Generic in 445. Then the Emperor Honorius recalled the 
Roman legions from Britain, and left the people of the land to 
shift for themselves. 

Previous to this, about the close of the fourth century, the 
Anglo-Saxons had begun to attack the coast of Britain. But as 
the Roman power inland was then growing weaker, the Romans 
had much to do to keep the Province safe from the Picts and Scots 
in the northern part of the Island ; and the coasts now began to 
be ravaged also by the fleets of the Saxons. Still, these for the 



76 ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE 

time were kept at bay. But after the Romans had been recalled 
from Britain, then it was much easier for the Angles and the 
Saxons to make their raids and incursions into the country. They 
could now come not only to plunder and go away, but to settle 
and live in the land. The Britons, it is said, were foolish enough 
to ask them to help them against the Picts and the Scots, and 
when they got into the country, you may be sure they took care 
to remain there. After two hundred years, or at the close of the 
sixth century, they had conquered and taken possession of more 
than half of what is now called England. The Britons, however, 
held on to the country lying along the western coast. They still 
possessed in the northwest up to the Frith of the Clyde, that 
long stretch of country then called the Kingdom of Strathclyde ; 
below this in the centre, what was then called North Wales; and 
in the south, the Peninsula, inclining westward, then called 
West Wales ; so that the Anglo-Saxons in the sixth century had 
as yet nowhere obtained any access to the Irish Sea. 

The Anglo-Saxons were not Christians when they came into 
Britain, nor were they much civilized. They continued to worship 
their old false gods, which our own names of the week still recall. 
Wednesday is Woden's day, their highest god, as Thursday is 
the day of Thor, the god of thunder, air, rain and storm; Friday 
is Frie's day, the day of peace, joy and fruitfulness, the wife of 
Woden whose emblems, borne aloft by dancing maidens, brought 
increase to every stall and field they visited ; Saturday commem- 
orates an obscure god Saetore; and Tuesday is the day of Tiwes, 
the dark god to meet whom was death. Eostre, the god of the 
dawn or Spring, gives his name to the Christian festival of the 
Resurrection. These and others the Anglo-Saxons worshipped 
at least one hundred and fifty years after they had settled in 
Britain . 

You may be sure a great many different Teutonic tribes had a 
share in this great movement across the seas. But they seem to 
have been all nearly akin to each other, and to have used nearly 
the same language. Three tribes are spoken of especially above 
all others : the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes. Of these three 
the Saxons are those of whom we hear first ; and this is no doubt 
why the Celtic people of Scotland, Wales and Ireland call all 
Englishmen Saxons to this day. But the Angles took a greater 
part of the land than any of the others, so that it was they that 
gave their name to the land and its people ; hence they are called 
England and the English. 



CONVERSION OF NORTHUMBRIA 77 

§ 33. The Heptarchy in the Sixth Century. 

The first Teutonic kingdom in Britain began in the year of our 
Lord 449. This was the Kingdom of Kent. It was natural that 
Kent should be the first part of Britain to be conquered, because 
it was the nearest point to the mainland of Europe. So the 
English conquest began at Kent, just as the Roman conquest had 
done. The Kingdom of Kent was a kingdom of the Jutes, who 
were a tribe which took to themselves a smaller part of Britain 
than any other, only Kent and the Isle of Wight, and what is now 
called Hampshire. The people that came next were Saxons, who 
landed on the south, adjoining Kent, in 477, where was formed the 
Kingdom of the South Saxons, which still keeps its name, being 
now called Sussex. The third English settlement, which in the 
end attained so much greater things than either of the former, was 
Wessex, which was also a settlement of the Saxons, who, as they 
fixed themselves, on the west of the Saxons who had first came 
over, were called the West Saxons, or the Kingdom of Wessex. 
East of these and partly north of Kent, there was another Saxon 
Kingdom, on the eastern coast, called that of the East Saxons or 
Essex. All these Saxon kingdoms touched upon Kent, enclosing 
it on the land side altogether. 

On the eastern coast, northward above Essex, the next settle- 
ment was that of the Angles, called East Anglia, divided into 
North Folk and South Folk, whose names are still retained as 
those of two counties; and west of East Anglia, in the middle, 
lay the great Anglian kingdom of the Mercians, that is, the 
March-men, the people of the march or frontier, made up of little 
States, which when fully joined together under one king, made 
one of the strongest kingdoms in England ; and some of the Mer- 
cian kings were very powerful princes. All these were on the 
southern side of the Humber. North of these and of the Humber, 
along the eastern coast, was Northumbria, also an Anglican king- 
dom, the seventh and one of the greatest ; but it was often divided, 
each faction seeking the supremacy in hostile strife, into two 
kingdoms, Bernicia and Deira, the latter of which answers pretty 
nearly to Yorkshire. Northumbria occupied the whole land along 
the eastern coast and midway inward north of the Humber, reach- 
ing as far as the Frith of Forth. 

§ 34. Conversion of Northumbria. 
Columba, or as he is sometimes called, St. Columbanus — 521- 
597 — an Irish abbot of royal descent, after founding monasteries 



78 ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE 

in the North of Ireland, passed in the year 563 over to Scotland, 
and for the next thirty-four years labored there as a missionary on 
the mainland and on the Hebrides, making his headquarters on 
one of the Hebrides, the celebrated Island of Iona. This then 
became the more important of the Irish missionary stations, 
years before Augustin had been sent over by Gregory as a mis- 
sionary from Rome to Kent. He was made the first Archbishop 
of Canterbury. 

In 634 Oswald became king over the rude population of North- 
umbria, and he sent for a missionary to Iona. Aidan — who died 
in 651 — was commissioned for the work. He led a religious col- 
ony to I^indisfarne, which is at low water a peninsula, at high 
water an island, ten miles southeast of Berwick -on -Tweed. At 
Ivindisfarne, where Oswald founded for himself a bishopric, Aidan 
formed a great missionary station for Northumbria. He gave his 
goods to the poor, travelled on foot among the people whom he 
sought to bring to Christ, and won their hearts by simple truth 
and self-denying earnestness. More Irish missionaries passed 
through Lindisfarne to join the work, and then the place came to 
be known as the " Holy Isle." 

§ 35. Conversion of the Kingdoms South of the Humber. 

Sometimes one king was so powerful as to get some sort of 
power over all the others ; when this happened he was called a 
Bretwalda. The office was not hereditary nor did it ever stay 
long in the same kingdom. It depended upon the Bretwalda 's 
being himself a wise man and a great warrior. Kthelbert, King 
of Kent, when he with his subjects became a Christian, was a 
Bretwalda, being the third king of that rank, who was said to 
have been lord over all the kingdoms south of the Humber. 
These then, with their subjects, were soon induced also, in iniita- 
tation of their greater lord or Bretwalda, to embrace Christianity. 
The only part of English Britain then which was not under his 
will as Bretwalda was Northumbria during the reign of Ethelbert 
in Kent; and for some years afterwards, Northumbria was not 
visited by any missionaries from Kent or Rome. It was after his 
death that there arose a great king in Northumbria called Edwin, 
who lived from 585 to 633. He was the fourth Bretwalda; and 
he is said in the Chronicle to have been lord over all Britain save 
Kent alone. To establish his interests there, he sought for him- 
self a Kentish wife, Arthelba, the daughter of the late King 



CONVERSION OF THE ANGLO-SAXONS 79 

Ethelbert, and, of course, she was a Christian. She took with her 
a certain priest called Paulinus — who died in 644 — that he might 
keep her in the right way, and also preach unto the men of the 
land. After a long -while Edwin and his people were converted 
in a measure. They did not remain so, however, and soon many 
fell back again into the worship of their old gods. The full 
conversion of Northumbria then was not effected by emissaries 
from Kent or Rome, but by those from another quarter. 

For the next thirty years the Celts were in all this region spirit- 
ual teachers of the English ; and it was out of the midst of this 
great North of England movement in the newly established mon- 
astery of Whitby, that the English heart sang through the verses 
of Caedmon the first great hymn based on the words of truth. 

§.36. Conversion of the Anglo-Saxons. 

While Jutes and Angles and Saxons were making themselves 
masters of Central and Southern Britain, the Angles, who had 
landed on its northernmost shore beyond the Humber, had been 
slowly winning for themselves the coast district between the Forth 
and the Tyne, which bore the name of Bernicia. Their progress 
seems to have been small until they were gathered into a kingdom 
in 547 by Ida, the "Flame-Bearer," as he was called. Once 
master of the Britons in their neighborhood, the Bernician Angles 
turned to conquer their Anglican neighbors to the south, the men 
of Deira, whose first King Aella was sinking to the grave — dying 
in 588. The struggle filled the foreign market with slaves, and 
one of the most memorable stories in English history shows us a 
group of such captives as they stood in the market-place at Rome. 
Of these youths, the white bodies, the fair faces, the golden hair, 
were noticed by a deacon as he passed along. " From what coun- 
try do these slaves come ? ' ' the deacon — afterward Pope Gregory — 
asked the trader who had bought them. The slave-dealer an- 
swered, "They are Angles." The deacon's pity veiled itself in 
poetic humor. "Not Angles, but angels," he said, "with faces 
so angel -like." "From what country came they?" he then 
asked. " They came," said the merchant, "from Deira." " De 
ira!" exclaimed the admiring Roman. "Aye, plucked from 
God's ire and called to Christ's mercy. And what is the name of 
their king?" "Aella," the merchant replied, and Gregory seized 
upon the word as a good omen. "Aelluluia shall be sung in 
Aella 's land," he said, as he passed along, musing how the angel 
faces should be made to sing it. 



80 ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE 

Years passed away after Gregory, the deacon, had pitied the 
Anglican slaves in the market-place at Rome. A Bishop of the 
Imperial City, he at length found himself in a position to carry 
out his dream of winning Britain to the Faith ; and an opening 
was given him by the marriage of Aethelbert, King of Kent, with 
Bertha, a daughter of the Frankish king, Charibet of Paris, and 
Bertha, like her Frankish kindred, was a Christian. A bishop 
accompanied her from Gaul, and a ruined church, the Church of 
St. Martin, by the side of the royal city of Canterbury, was given 
them for their worship. The king himself remained true to the 
gods of his fathers ; but his marriage, no doubt, encouraged 
Gregory to send a Roman abbot, Augustin, at the head of a band 
of monks, to preach the Gospel to the Anglian people. The mis- 
sionaries arrived in 597 A. D. on the island Thanet, where 
Hengist had landed more than a century before. Aethelbert 
yielded to the preaching of Augustine, and from the moment of 
his conversion the new faith advanced rapidly : and the Kentish 
men crowded to baptism in the train of their king. 

§ 37. Anglo-Saxon Literature. 

The early history of literature in England might lead some 
countenance to the theory of the development of a nation's 
literature, that it is, at bottom but a chapter of its religious history. 
While the religion of the early Anglo-Saxons was in the main a 
rude, awe-struck worship of the forces of nature: literature either 
had no existence for them, or it was in a state still elementary, 
consisting of a few war songs, and nothing more. With the ad- 
vent of the religion of Christ — the only faith which at once recog- 
nizes the original dignity of human nature and repairs its fall — 
came an intellectual as well as a spiritual awakening to the Teu- 
tonic nations; for into such state of slumber had the original 
tribes now grown that were planted in the old provinces of Roman 
Britain. Fortified by Gospel precept for the present life, and 
thrilled with the hope of a life to come, the Saxon minds released 
from disquietude, felt free to range discursively through such 
regions of knowledge as its teachers opened before it ; and the 
Saxon heart was fain to pour out many a rude but vigorous song. 
Pope Gregory himself, who according to the old phraseology, sent 
baptism to the English, is said to have spoken disparagingly of 
human learning : but the missionaries could not fail to bring with 
them from Rome the intellectual culture of the countries border- 



ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE 81 

ing on the Mediterranean, so far as it had survived the fall of the 
Western Empire and the irruption of the Northern Barbarians. 
The Roman alphabet, paper or parchment, pen and ink, drove out 
the Northern runes, the beechen tablet, and the scratching imple- 
ment. The necessity of the preservation, and, at least, partial 
translation of the Scriptures, the various exigencies of the Catholic 
Ritual, the demand for so much knowledge of Astronomy as would 
enable the clergy to fix beforehand the date of Easter, all favored, 
or rather compelled, the promotion of learning and education up 
to a certain point ; and led to a continual discussion and inter- 
change of ideas. Gratefully and eagerly the early Saxons drew in 
the warm and genial breath, which came to them from the intense 
and higher enlightenment of the South. Beda dates his history by 
the indictions of the Eastern Emperors ; and while in practice he 
obeyed his native king, descended from Woden, in theory he recog- 
nized the larger and more rational sway of the Caesar at Constan- 
tinople. 

On a closer examination we find that there were two principal 
centres during the first two centuries after the Conversion, where 
learning was honored and literature nourished. These centres 
were Wessex and Northumbria. For, although Christianity had 
been preached in Kent, and the great monastery of Canterbury was 
long a valuable school of theology and history — witness the liberal 
praise awarded by Beda to Abbot Albinus in the preface to his 
Ecclesiastical History — yet the limited size of the kingdom, and the 
ill -fortune in its wars with Mercia and Wessex, seemed to have 
checked its intellectual growth. When we have named the oldest 
form of the Saxon Chronicle — that represented by the Parker MS. 
— and the not very interesting works of Abbot Aelfrit, there is 
little left in the shape of extant writings, dating before the 
Conquest, for which we have to thank the men of Kent. But in 
Wessex and Northumbria alike, the size of the territory, the 
presence of numerous monasteries, perhaps also the proximity of 
Celtic people, or societies endowed with many literary gifts, the 
Britons in the case of Wessex and the Culdees of Iona in the case 
of Northumbria, cooperated to produce a long period of literary 
activity, the monuments of which must now be our endeavor 
briefly to review and characterize. 

But before we consider the Anglo-Saxon literature which was 
founded on Christianity, the question whether any Anglo-Saxon 
literature of a date prior to the Conversion demands an answer. 
7 



82 ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE 

It was formerly thought that the important poem by Beourilf was 
in the main a pagan work, and that it must have been produced 
before the Angles and Saxons left their German homes on the Con- 
tinent ; but closer in vestigation has shown that it is permeated almost 
everywhere with Christian ideas, and that it cannot be dated earlier 
than the first quarter of the eighth century. Nevertheless his poems 
remain, presenting problems of great difficulty, many of which 
have not yet been satisfactorily solved. As far as it appears they 
must have been composed in Germany, while these Angles and 
Saxons were still in their German seats. These are The Traveller's 
Song and Deor's Complaint. In the first, Widsith, a poet of the 
Myrging race, recounts the nations that he has visited as a travel- 
ling glee-man ; names the kings who ruled over them ; and singles 
out two or three whose open-handed generosity he had experienced, 
and to whom accordingly he awards the tribute of a poet's praise. 
The poem may perhaps be dated from the second half of the sixth 
century, although written on or near Anglen, after the migration 
of most of the Angles to Britain. The language of the song 
seems to have been accommodated to the ordinary West-Saxon dia- 
lect, for in this respect it differs in no degree from the other poems, 
which stand before and after it in the Exeter Codex. The second, 
Deor's Complaint, mentions Weland the Teutonic demi-god, cor- 
responding to Vulcan, Theoderic and others. It is the lament of 
a bard supplanted by a rival in his lord's favor. In date it is not 
far distant from The Traveller's Song. 

§ 38. Aiiglo-Saxon War Songs. 

The oldest Anglo-Saxon poem in existence is the Legend of 
the mystical hero Beowulf. It was doubtless also composed and 
sung by the Angles and Saxons while yet they lived in the home- 
land of their race, in Schleswig and Jutland ; and it was, therefore, 
brought by them to Britain, probably as early as the latter part of 
the fifth century. In its original form it was, no doubt, thoroughly 
pagan in style and character. But in its form as we now have it, 
it is a revision by an Anglo-Saxon Christian of the eighth cen- 
tury ; and it is plain that its monkish reviser has attempted to 
modify many passages by introducing ideas more in consonance 
with the new religion. Yet it still preserves much of the original 
pagan tone and temper, and it paints in vivid colors the life and 
manners and modes of thought which characterized our rude 
forefathers. The idea of Fatalism, an idea not altogether confined 



ANGLO-SAXON WAR SONGS 83 

to heathenism, is prominent throughout this and other poems of 
the Anglo-Saxon period. Still, there was among the people an 
abundance of self-reliance, a strong sense of honor, a contempt 
for cowardice of every kind. Thus they expressed themselves : 
''Let him work who can, work his doomed deeds ere death 
comes; death is better than a life of shame." 

The scene of the story of Beowulf is probably the Island of 
Seeland in Denmark. But the Anglo-Saxon, who revised the 
poem, has described it in that part of the Northumbrian sea coast, 
which was familiar to him — the bold promontory and high cliffs 
in the neighborhood of Whitby. Everywhere throughout the 
poem we are brought face to face with wild nature, as it was seen 
and understood by our nature-worshipping ancestors; and our 
minds are impressed with their internal love for the sea and their 
fierce passion for war. Rude in action and rough in manners 
though they were, yet we cannot fail to perceive that their minds 
were imbued with a high sense of justice, of patriotism, of " man- 
liness and the worth of man." 

Besides the story of Beowulf, we have two or three other war 
songs belonging to the Anglo-Saxon period, all breathing the 
same spirit of submission to the decrees of fate, of stern devotion to 
principle, and of hatred and defiance to the enemies of the coun- 
try. The Battle of Finnenburgh, found written on the back of a 
manuscript of Homilies, belongs probably to the old pagan days. 
Thus it reads : 

The army goes forth, the birds sing, 
The cricket chirps, the war weapons sound, 
The lance clangs against the shield. 
Now shineth the moon, wandering along the sky, 

Now arise the decrees of woe, 
Which the enmity of this people make ready to do. 

Then in the court came the tumult of war — carnage. 
They seized in their hands the hollow wood of the shield ; 

They smote through the bones of the head. 
The roofs of the castle resounded until Garulf fell in battle, 

The first of earth-dwelling, son of Guthlaf ; 

Around him lay many brave men dying. 

The raven whirled about, 
Dark and sombre, like a willow leaf ; 
There was a sparkling of blades, 
As if all Finnenburgh were on fire. 
Never have I heard of a more worthy battle in war. 



84 ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE 

In the battle of Brunanburh — anno 937 — written three hundred 
years later, we see how the old martial spirit survived, and how 
the sombre earnestness and dreary imagery of the singers suffered 
no decay, as may be seen in the following strains : 

The King Ethelstan, chief of chiefs ; 
He who bestows the collar of honor on the brave, 
And his brother Edmund, a lasting honor. 

Now with the edges of the sword at Brunanburh, 
They cleaved the wall of bucklers. 
They hewed the noble banners with the wreck of their hammers ; 
So were they taught to defend their land, 
Their homes and their hoards against the robber. 
From sunrise in the morning tide, and while the greatest star, 

God's candle bright, glided over the earth, 
And until the noble creature set in the western main, 
There lay many of the Northern men, 
Struck down with darts shot over their shoulders. * * 

The screamers of war they left behind for the raven to enjoy, 
The black raven with pointed beak, 

The eagle famishing for flesh, 
The greedy battle-hawk and the yellow-breast, 
The wolf of the wood. 

Another war song, The Fight of Maldon — anno 991 — is simi- 
lar, but it differs from the others in being the record not of vic- 
tory, but of defeat. 



The Anglo-Saxons were much more savage and ignorant than 
the other Teuton nations who settled within the Empire. The 
old country at the mouth of the Elbe was a land that the Romans 
had never reached at all. The Anglo-Saxons, therefore, had not, 
like the Goths, become purely civilized, by constant intercourse 
with the Romans, either by fighting against them or fighting for 
them. For the same reasons they were still heathens, for they 
had had no opportunity of hearing of the Christian religion from 
any of the Roman clergy. Therefore, the Angles and Saxons 
made war in a much more savage way than the Goths did. The 
latter, with most other Teutonic nations, thought it enough to 
conquer, but they did not destroy. They often professed for 
a while to be subjects of the Roman emperors. At any rate they 
neither killed all the Roman inhabitants nor yet destroyed their 
towns. They made their own kings rulers of the land, but they 
made themselves the chief men in it ; and they seized upon a 



ANGLO-SAXON WAR SONGS 85 

large part of the land to maintain the king and his followers. But 
they generally left the Romans to live in their old way, and to be 
governed by their own laws. Most of them admired the fine 
buildings which the Romans had made, and preserved and imi- 
tated them as well as they could. Moreover, as they were Chris- 
tians, they respected the churches and the clergy ; and the clergy, 
on the other hand, who were mostly Romans, retained great power 
and large estates. Thus you see how the two nations gradually 
mixed together, and how it came to pass that, in all the South of 
Europe, the language as nearly everything else is much more 
Roman than Teutonic. 

But the Romans in Britain and the Welsh who, as we may say, 
had turned Romans, did not fare nearly so well at the hands of 
their Anglo-Saxon invaders. These fierce warriors knew nothing 
and cared nothing either about the Christian religion or about the 
arts and manners of Rome. They destroyed nearly everything 
which those Teutons, who conquered the South of Europe, took 
care to preserve. At first they appear to have destroyed all the 
towns which they took ; but some of the great cities they seem 
not to have taken for a good while ; not, in fact, until they them- 
selves had become somewhat more civilized. And, instead of 
either mixing with the people, or else leaving them to their own 
laws and part of their lands, they always either killed or made 
slaves of as many of the people as possible. Those who could 
not get away, no doubt, escaped into Wales and Cornwall ; and 
the other parts of the island which the Angles and Saxons had 
not yet reached. There is every reason to believe that the in- 
vaders brought over with them women of their own people. Still 
we cannot suppose that the British women were so completely 
killed or driven out as the men ; some would be made slaves, and 
might even be married to their masters. Thus there may doubt- 
less be some little British and Roman blood in the English, just 
as some British and Latin words crept into the English tongue 
from the very beginning. But we may be sure that the English 
have not much of their blood, because they have so few of their 
words in their language. Accordingly, we find that the English 
really became the people of the land in the whole of that part of 
Britain which they conquered. For they had killed or driven out 
all the former people, save those whom they kept as mere slaves. 
Thus they retained their own language, their own manners, and 
their own religion. All this is very different from the conquests 



86 ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE 

of the other Teutons in the South of Europe. There the Goths and 
the other nations did not really become simply the people of the 
land ; they either were rulers over its former people, or else they 
were altogether mixed up with them ; and everywhere they be- 
came Christians, and learned to speak such Latin as was then 
spoken. In the middle of the fifth century the Brito- Welsh in- 
vited to Britain the Athelings of the Angles ; Hengist and Horsa 
came in 449 ; in 495 came two ealdermen to Britain, Cerdic and 
Cyndric, who, in 519, became kings of the West Saxons. In 
each case the erection of a throne was probably the result of some 
great victory. Hereditary royalty was one of the results of the 
migration. 

§ 39 Caedmon, 

Turning now to the other literary centre, the Northumbrian 
kingdom, we find that impulse and initiation were due to more 
than one source. In the main the conversion of the Angles north 
of the Tees, and implantation among them of the germs of culture 
are traceable to Iona, and indirectly to the Irish Church and St. 
Patrick. From Ireland in the person of St. Columba and his 
followers was wafted to the long low Island surrounded by the 
mountains of the Hebrides a ministry of light and civilization 
which, from the sixth to the eleventh century, diffused its bless- 
ings over Northern Europe. We have already seen how, under 
King Oswald, missionaries, being sent for, came from Iona and 
founded the Bishop's See at Lindisfarne, or Holy Isle; and that 
thence issued the monasteries of Hexham, Coldingham, Whitby, 
and many other places. The actual representatives of the 
monks of Iona returned after some years to their own country, 
because they would not give way in the dispute concerning 
Easter, but the civilizing effects of their mission did not pass away. 
The school of piety and learning which produced an Aidan, an 
Adamnan, and a Culbert, deserved well not of England but of 
humanity. Adamnan, Abbot of Iona, about the year 690, has a 
peculiar interest for us, because a long extract from his work on 
the holy places is incorporated by Beda in his Ecclesiastical History. 
He also wrote a life of its founder, St. Columba. To the en- 
couragement of Bishop Aidan we owe it that Hilda, a lady of the 
royal house of Deira, established monasteries at Hartlepool and 
Whitby, and it was by the monks of Whitby that the seed was. 
sown, which falling upon a good heart and capacious brain, bore 
fruit in the poetry of Caedmon the earliest known English Chris- 



BKDA 87 

tian poet. We need not repeat 'the well-known story of the vision, 
in which the destined bard, then an humble menial employed 
about the stables and boat service of the monastry, believed that 
an injunction of more than human authority was laid upon him 
to sing of the Beginning of Creation. The impulse having been 
once communicated, Caedmon, as Beda informs us, continued for a 
long time to clothe in his native measures the principal religious 
facts recorded in the Pentateuch and in the New Testament. The 
opening cantos of the Paraphrase, which treat of the Rebellion 
of the Angles and the Fall of Man, are allowed by general 
consent, to be those most vividly expressed and most character- 
ized by poetical power. It is here that bright, strong phrases occur 
which, as is believed, Milton himself did not disdain to utilize, 
and his known acquaintance with Francis Junius, the then pos- 
sessor of the Caedmon manuscript, seems to lend some counte- 
nance to the belief. 

§40. Beda. 

Hitherto the influences in Northumbria tending to culture have 
been found to be only indirectly Roman : their immediate source 
was Iona. But we now come to the Venerable Beda, or Bede — 
673-735 — the great light of the Northumbrian Church, the glory 
of letters in a rude and turbulent age, nay even the teacher and 
the beacon light of all Europe ; for, during the period from the 
seventh to the tenth century, we find that the fountain, from 
whence he drew the streams of thought and knowledge came 
from no derivative source, but was supplied directly from the 
well-head of Christian culture. Benedict Biscop, a young North- 
umbrian thane, much employed and favored in the court of 
Osway, abandoned the world for the Church, and travelling to 
Rome, resided there for several years, diligently studying the 
details of ecclesiastic life and training, together with the institutes 
of Liturgical order. Returning to England in 668, with Theodore, 
the new Primate, and the Abbot Hadrian, he brought into North- 
umbria a large number of books, relics and other ecclesiastical 
objects. Being warmly welcomed by King Egfrid, he founded 
the monastery of St. Peter on land granted by the king at the 
mouth of the Wear; and that the other great apostolic name, 
venerated at Rome, might not go without due honor, he built a 
second monastery in honor of St. Paul, at Jarrow, on the Tyne, 
seven miles from Wearmouth. After the founder's time the two 
monasteries were usually governed by one Abbot. When only 



88 ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE 

seven years old, Beda was brought by his father to Jarrow and 
given up to the Abbot, to be trained to a monastic life. The rest 
of his life, down to the year 731, was passed in the monaster}', as 
we know from his own statements. His works may be grouped 
under five heads: Educational, Theological, Historical, Poetical 
and Letters. His Ecclesiastical History, of all the most important, 
opens with a preface, in which, in that tone of calmness and mild 
dignity, which go so far to make a perfect prose, Beda explains 
in details the nature and source of the evidence on which he has 
relied in compiling the work. A short introduction then sketches 
the general history of Britain from the landing of Julius Caesar to 
the coming of Augustin ; and then from the landing of Augustin 
in 596 to the year 731 , the progress of Christianity, the success and 
reverses of the Church, the arduous work of bringing within her 
pale the fiercely warring nations of the Heptarchy, are narrated 
fully, but unsystematically, for each kingdom of the Heptarchy in 
turn. Among his poetical works are a life of St. Cuthbert in 
Latin hexameters ; a number of hymns, most of which are written 
in the lively iambic metre, of which a familiar instance is the 
hymn beginning with ' ' Yexilla regis prodeunt ; ' ' a poem of Justin 
Martyr in trochaic metre ; and another in hexameter on the Day 
of Judgment. 



English prose may be fairly said to begin with Beda. He was 
born about 673, and was, like Caedmon, a Northumbrian. From 
683 he spent his life at Jarrow. " In the same monaster}-, " he 
says, " and while attentive to the rule of mine order, and the ser- 
vice of the Church, my constant pleasure lay in learning, or teach- 
ing, or writing ." He long enjoyed that pleasure, for his quiet 
life was long, and, from boyhood till his very last hour, his toil 
was unceasing. Forty-five works prove his industry, and their 
fame over the whole of learned Europe during his time proves 
their value. His learning was as various as it was great. All 
that the world then knew of Science, Music, Medicine, Arithme- 
tic, Astronomy, or Physics, was brought together by him ; and 
his life was as gentle as himself, as lovely as his work was great. 
His was the first effort to make English prose a literary language, 
for his last work was a Translation of the Gospel of St. John, and 
almost his last words were in English verse. In the story of his 
death, told by his disciple Cuthbert, is the first record of English 



ALCUIN 89 

prose-writing. When the last day came, the dying man called his 
scholars to him that he might dictate more of his translations. 
' ' There is still a chapter wanting, ' ' said the scribe. " It is easily 
done," said Beda, "take the pen and write quickly." Through 
the day he wrote, and when evening fell the youth said : " There 
is yet one sentence unwritten, dear master." " Write it quickly," 
said the master. " It is finished now." " Thou say est truth," 
was the reply: "all is finished now." He sang the " Glory to 
God" — Gloria in Excelsis — and died. It is to that scene that 
English prose looks back as to its sacred source, as it is in the 
greatness and variety of Beda's Latin work that English literature 
strikes the keynote. 

When Beda died Northumbria was the home of English litera- 
ture. Though as yet written mostly in Latin, it was a wide- 
spread literature. Wilfrid of York and Benedict Biscop had 
founded libraries and established monastic schools far and wide. 
Six hundred scholars gathered around Beda ere he died. But to- 
wards the end of his life this northern literature began to decay, 
and after 866 it was, we may say, blotted out by the Danes. The 
long battle with these invaders was lost in Northumbria, but it was 
gained for a time by Alfred the Great in Wessex ; and with Alfred's 
literary work, learning changed its seat from the North to the 
South. But he made it by his writing an English, not a Latin 
literature; and in his translations, since Beda's work is lost, he is 
the true father of English prose. As Whitby is the cradle of 
English poetry, so is Winchester of English prose. At Winches- 
ter Alfred took the English tongue and made it the tongue in 
which history, philosophy, law, and religion spoke to the English 
people. No work was ever done more eagerly and more practi- 
cally. He brought scholars from different parts of the world. He 
set up schools in his monasteries, "where every free-born youth, 
who has the means, shall attend to his book till he can read Eng- 
lish writing perfectly." 

§41. Alcuin. 

At the time that Beda died — 735 — the Angles of Northumbria 
were beginning to lay aside the usages of arms, and zealously to 
frequent the monastery schools. Among their princes, as among 
the people of Wessex, some were found to exchange a crown for 
a cowl, and a throne for a cell. But a reaction set in: perhaps 
some had tried asceticism who had no vocation for it ; and after 



90 ANGLO-SAXON UTKRATURK 

the middle of the century Northumbrian history is darkened by 
the frequent records of dissension among the members of the royal 
house, civil war and assassination. In this state of things came 
the ravages of the Northmen, which made matters incurable. 
I^indisfarne with all its treasures and collections was destroyed by 
them in 793. This is but a sample of the havoc wrought by those 
barbarians ; yet for a long time many monasteries escaped ; and, 
in particular, that of York was a centre of learning far into the 
ninth century ; probably till the disastrous battle which occurred 
before York, described in the Saxon Chronicle in the year 867. 

At this monastery Alcuin was educated, and when grown up he 
had charge of its schools and library. In 780 he was sent on a 
mission to Rome, and on his return to Pavia, he fell in with the 
Emperor Charlemagne, who invited him to settle at Aix-la-Cha- 
pelle, at that time the chief imperial residence, to teach his children 
and aid in the organization of education throughout his dominions. 
Having obtained permission from his superiors at York, Alcuin 
complied with this request, and from that time until his death, in 
804, resided, with but little intermission, either at the Imperial 
Court or at Tours. His extant works are of considerable bulk: 
they are chiefly educational or theological treatises, which, for 
lack of vigor, have fallen into complete oblivion. 



After the death of Alcuin in 804, the confusion in Northum- 
bria became even worse and worse, for the Danes forced their way 
into the land ; and many years passed before the two nations could 
agree to live on friendly terms, side by side. 

But for the Durham Gospels, a version in the Anglo-Saxon 
dialect of the Four Gospels, and a few similar remains, the North 
of England presents a dead blank to the historian of literature, 
from Alcuin to Simon of Durham, a period of more than three 
hundred years. In the South, as we have seen, the resistance to 
the barbarians was more successful. The works of Aelfric, who 
died Archbishop of Canterbury in 1006, are chiefly interesting be- 
cause they show the growing importance of the native language. 
His Homilies are in Anglo-Saxon : his Colloquy is a conversation 
on common things between a master and a scholar. The work 
of collecting and transcribing the remains of the national poetry 
was begun at that time, of which the priceless volume known as 
the Exeter Codex, presented to the library at Exeter Cathedral in the 



ALFRED THE GREAT AND DUNSTAN 91 

reign of Edward the Confessor, is the monument and the fruit. The 
collection contained in the manuscript discovered about fifty years 
ago, the Vercelli Book, was probably made about the same time. 
In these two collections are contained the works of Cynewulf, the 
Traveller ' s Song, the Poem of the Phoeiiix, and so forth. Being 
thus made more widely known, the ancient poems would soon have 
had imitators, and a fresh development of Anglo-Saxon poetry 
would have been the result had there been no violent changes. 
England would have gotten through with the task of assimilating 
and taming the Northmen; and in spite of physical isolation, it 
would have participated, though probably lagging far behind the 
rest, in the general intellectual advance of the nations of Europe ; 
the tissue of her civilization would have been in a preponderating 
measure Teutonic, like that of Germany ; but it would have 
lacked the golden thread of the " Holy Roman Empire," which 
brought an element of idealism and beauty into the plain texture 
of German life, for good or for evil. The process of national and 
also of intellectual development was to be altered, and quickened 
by the arrival of a knightly race of conquerors from across the 
channel. 

§ 42. Alfred the Great and Dunstan. 

The Anglo-Saxon Prose Period contains very few names, but 
above all shines forth that of King Alfred — 848-901. His early 
love for the old national poetry, the growing neglect of Latin even 
by the priests, and the eager desire, of which he himself tells us, 
that the people might enjoy the treasures of learning, collected in 
the churches for security from the invaders, urged him to the cul- 
ture of the native tongue for popular instruction. While inviting 
over from the continent learned men to repair the decay of schol- 
arship, the King himself set the example of translating existing 
works into the vernacular. Having learned Latin only late in 
life, he did not disdain the help of scholars in clearing up gram- 
matical difficulties, while he himself brought to the work untiring 
industry, great capacity of comprehending the author's meaning, 
and sound judgment on points needing illustration. 

Having gained some success in battle over the Danes, leading 
to a treaty and the conversion of part of them to Christianity, he 
obtained a period of peace for his harassed and dejected country- 
men. History tells us how well he sought in every way to build 
up the fallen edifice of West Saxon society. Among his labors 



92 ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE 

not the least meritorious was his translation of Beda's Historia 
Ecclesiastica , Pope Gregory's work, De Cura Pastorali, the famous 
treatise of Boethius, De Consolatione Philosophies ', and the Uni- 
versal History oi Orosius. He also founded several schools and 
made a beginning in the work of restoring monasteries. Yet, in 
spite of his generous efforts, the evils caused by the Danes could 
not be repaired. A sort of blight seemed to have passed over the 
Anglo-Saxon genius ; the claims of material existence suddenly 
seemed to engross their thoughts ; perhaps their sufferings had 
taught them that. However it may be with individuals, for 
nations all higher developments must have a basis of material 
prosperity to rest upon. Now and then a great man appeared, 
endowed with a reparative force and with a courage which aimed 
to raise the fallen spirit of the people, and turning them back 
again into the old paths of nobleness. Such a man was St. Dun- 
stan, who fought with a giant's strength against corruption, sloth 
and ignorance ; and was ever faithful to the interests of learning. 
There is in the Bodleian Library at Oxford a little volume, prob- 
ably written in his own hand ; it is a sort of commonplace book ; 
the frontispiece is a drawing of the saint prostrated at the feet of 
the throned Christ, executed by Dunstan himself. Among the 
contents of the volume are a grammatical treatise by Buegelius, 
with extremely curious Welsh glosses ; a part of De Arte Amandi ; 
and lessons in Latin and Greek, taken from the Pentateuch and 
the Prophets. But his work was undone during the disastrous 
reign of Ethelred I at the end of which the Danish power estab- 
lished itself in England. Under Edward the Confessor, French 
influence began greatly to be felt. The two races of the Teutonic 
North had torn each other to pieces, and the culture which Saxons 
had been able to impart to the Northerner was not sufficient to 
discipline him into a true civilized man. England, though at a 
terrible cost, had to be knit on to the system of Southern Europe ; 
her anarchy must give place to centralization; her schools, her 
art, and her architecture must be remodelled by French and 
Italians ; and her poets turn their eyes, not towards Ireland, but 
towards France and Provence. 



The grand light, however, of the tenth century was Alfric, 
or Aelfric, Archbishop of Canterbury, surnamed Grammaticus — 
955-1020 — whose opposition to Romish doctrines called attention to 






PURE ANGLO-SAXON 93 

his work, and so gave an impulse to Anglo-Saxon studies in modern 
times. His eight Homilies are his chief work. He also translated 
the Books of Moses, and wrote other theological treatises: as a 
grammarian he labored to revive the neglected study of Latin 
Grammar by his Glossary and Colloquium, a conversation book. 
He is often confounded with two other Alfrics, the name being 
common among the Anglo-Saxons. There was an Alfric, Abbot 
of Malmesbury, who died in 994, and an Alfric, surnamed Bata, 
Archbishop of York, who died in 1051, a devoted disciple of the 
Greek Alfric, whose Grammar and Colloquium he republished. 
In the eleventh century we need only mention Wulfstan , an Arch- 
bishop — died 1023 — the author of some homilies. 

It remains to refer only to two great monuments of Anglo-Saxon 
prose literature, the Chronicle and the Laws. The former is a 
record of the history of the people, compiled at first, as is believed, 
for Alfred by Phegmund, Archbishop of Canterbury, who brought 
it down to the year A. D. 891. Thence it was continued, as a 
contemporary record, to the end of the Anglo-Saxon period in 
the middle of the twelfth century. It breaks off abruptly in the 
first year of Henry II, A. D. 1154. The fragments of the A?tglo- 
Saxon Laws, contains some as early as the reign of Bthelbert, 
King of Kent — who died in 616 — reduced, however, to the lan- 
guage of a later ,age. Alfred, who began the work, says that 
with the advice of - his Witan — a learned man — he rejected what 
did not please, but added little of his own. The work was then 
submitted to and adopted by the Witan. His chief followers in 
these labors were Athelstan, Ethelred and Canute. 

§ 43. Pure Anglo-Saxon. 

The English Chro?iicle at first was nothing but a record of the 
births and deaths of bishops and kings, and was probably only a 
West Saxon chronicle. Alfred the Great edited it from various 
sources, added largely to it from Beda, and raised it to the dignity 
of a national history. After his reign, and that of his son Ead- 
ward, from 901 to 925, it becomes scanty; but songs and odes 
are inserted in it. In the reign of Ethelred, and during the 
Danish kings, its fulness returns, and, growing by additions from 
various quarters, it continues to be our great contemporary au- 
thority in English literature till 1154, when it abruptly closes 
with the death of Stephen. " It is the first history of any Teu- 
tonic people in their own language : it is the earliest and most ven- 



94 ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE 

erable monument of English prose." In its old English, poetry 
sang its last song: in its death, old English prose dies. It is not 
until the reign of John that English poetry in any extended form 
appears again in the Brut of Layamon . It is not till the reign of 
Edward, the Third, that original English prose again appears. 

The I^athi prose literature of the Anglo-Saxons consists of 
religious treatises, works on science and education, and histories 
in which the ecclesiastical element predominates. The earliest 
Anglo-Saxon in Latin is Wilfrid — 634-709 — Archbishop of York. 
His works are lost, but he deserves mention as the founder of the 
school of learning at York, which was fostered by Bishop Egbert, 
from 678 to 786, and produced a Beda and an Alcuin, the two 
great names of the Anglo-Saxon literature. But the Latin de- 
serves notice, because the vernacular was for the most part based 
on it. It was the product of foreign ecclesiastical influence. The 
earliest missionaries were imbued with the learning of the Western 
Church, and great schools were soon founded in Kent and the 
South, and afterwards in Northumbria. In the latter part of the 
seventh century Theodore of Tarsus became Archbishop of Canter- 
bury, and with his friend, the Abbot Adrian, taught both Greek 
and Latin literature. In the eighth century books were so multi- 
plied in England that Alcuin complained to Charlemagne of the 
literary poverty of France as compared with England. There 
was a decided preference for Greek authors above the Latin. The 
classical poets were read, but with a religious suspicion ; and the 
works most valued were those of the Fathers and the Christian 
poets, whose faults are closely imitated in the Latin poetry of the 
Anglo-Saxon churchmen. 

§ 44. Anglo-Saxon and Norman French Poetry. 

Poetry is a creative art. In the mind of the poet, as well as in 
that of the sculptor or painter, must first be conceived an ideal, to 
which he seeks to give an outward form or semblance : the sculptor 
presents it to the imagination in marble, the painter on canvas, 
the poet in language. Poetry is, moreover, emotional. It springs 
from the feelings, and to them it is addressed, to afford us pleasure ; 
and, therefore, its outward form should always be beautiful. 
There are, however, two kind of beauty, and poetry should 
partake of both. Mere outward beauty of form, expressed in the 
choicest language and the most exquisite rhythm, is not sufficient. 
Regard must be had also to the sentiment it contains. There is 



INTERFUSION INTO ENGLISH OP A CELTIC ELEMENT 95 

such a thing as an intellectual and moral beauty, an ideal as well 
as a visible beauty, the beauty ' of Truth and Holiness ; and to 
make poetry of the highest order, the two should be blended. 
The early English made most account of the intellectual and 
moral side of poetry ; the Norman French of its beautiful outward 
form and show. "There is," says Mr. Morley, "in the unmixed 
English an imagination with deep root and little flower, solid stem 
and no luxuriance of foliage. That which was in the poet's mind 
to say was realized at first, and then uttered with a direct earnest- 
ness, which carried every thought straight home to the apprehension 
of the listener. Both the Dutch and English, when the seed of 
Christianity struck root among them, mastered the first conditions 
of a full development of its grand truths with the same solid 
earnestness, and carried their convictions to the same practical 
result. Holland, indeed, has been, not less than England, with 
England and for England, a battle-ground of civil and religious 
liberty. The power of the English character, and, therefore, of 
the literature that expresses it, lies in the energetic sense of truth, 
and this firm habit of looking to the end. Christianity having 
been once accepted, the first English writers fastened upon it, and 
throughout the whole subsequent history of English literature, 
varied and enlivened by the diverse blending of the races that 
joined in the forming of the nation, its religious energy has been 
the centre of its life." 

This energy of character, however, of the English was first 
expended on their war songs, proceeding from their warm patriotic 
feelings. " If there is anything truly national in the world," says 
Mr. Freeman, "it is the old heroic songs of the English folk. 
England had her own history, alike mythical and real, sung in 
her own tongue; she had her .own tales of the fights between 
Briton and Englishmen, between Mercian and West-Saxon, 
though they are now preserved to us only in the faint echoes which 
still speak to us in the Eatin of the twelfth century." 

§ 45. The Interfusion into English of a Celtic Element. 
In the fusion of the two races, i. e., of the Celtic and English, 
which after the latter's conquest over the former, slowly began 
among the hills and valleys of the North and West of England, 
where the populations came most freely into contact, the gift of 
genius was the contribution of the Celt. A late writer, in Eng- 
land, of the best history of Architecture, when preparing the 



96 ANGLO-SAXON LITKRATURE 

ground for his work by a survey of the characteristics of the dif- 
ferent races in relation to his art says, that " the true glory of the 
Celt in Europe is his artistic eminence." "It is not perhaps," 
adds Mr. Ferguson, " too much to assert that, without his inter- 
vention we should not have possessed in modern times a church 
worthy of admiration, or a picture, or a statue, we could look at 
without shame." 

That close communion between themselves and departed spirits 
and superhuman beings, which the ancient Celts, especially the 
Druids, believed themselves to possess, did not forsake them after 
they had become Christians. It became only the more heavenly 
and divine. This is well attested in the story of Cuthbert, as well 
as in the stories of many other saints. Born on the southern 
edge of Lammermoor, Cuthbert found shelter at eight years old 
in a widow's house, in the little village of Wranghelm. Already 
in youth his robust frame had a poetic sensibility, which caught, 
even in the chance words of a game, a call to higher things, and 
a passing attack of lameness deepened his religious impression. 
A traveller coming in his white mantle over the hillside and stop- 
ping his horse, to attend to Cuthbert 's injured knee, seemed to be 
an angel. The boy's shepherd life carried him to the bleak up- 
lands, still famous as a sheep-walk, though a scanty herbage scarce 
veils the whinstone rock. There meteors plunging into the night 
became to him a company of angelic spirits, carrying the soul of 
Bishop Aiden heavenward, and his longings slowly settled into a 
resolute will towards a religious life. In 651 he made his way to 
a group of straw -thatched log-huts in the midst of un tilled soli- 
tudes, where a few Irish monks from Lindisfarne had settled in 
the mission-station of Melrose, to-day the land of poetry and ro- 
mance. Cheviot and L,ammermoor*, Bttrick and Teviotdale, Yarrow 
and Annan -Water, are musical with old ballads and border min- 
strelsy. The Northumbria peasants, among whom he journeyed 
as a missionary, were for the most part Christians only in name. 
With Teutonic indifference they yielded to their thegns — thanes 
or knights — in nominally accepting the new Christianity, as these 
had yielded to the king. But they retained their old superstitions 
side by side with the new worship ; plague or mishap drove them 
back to a reliance on their charms and amulets ; and if trouble 
befell the Christian preachers, who were settling among them, 
they took it as a proof of the wrath of the older gods. On foot 
and on horseback Cuthbert wandered among listeners such as 
these, choosing above all the remoter mountain villages from 



INTERFUSION INTO ENGLISH OF A CELTIC ELEMENT 97 

whose roughness and poverty other teachers turned aside. Hon- 
ored in his day, he finally became Bishop of Lindisfarne, and 
after his death was revered as 'a saint. 

While missionaries were then laboring among the peasantry, 
Northumbria saw the rise of a number of monasteries, not bound 
indeed by the strict ties of Benedictine rule, but gathered on the 
free Celtic model of the family, or, the clan round some noble 
and wealthy person, who sought devotional retirement. The 
most notable and wealthy of these houses was that of Streoneshalh, 
where Hild or Hilda, a woman of royal race, reared her abbey on 
the cliffs of Whitby, looking out over the North Sea, some con- 
siderable distance below the Holy Isle of Lindisfarne. Hild was 
a Northumbrian Deborah, whose counsel was sought even by 
kings ; and the double monastery over which she ruled became a 
seminary of bishops and priests. The sainted John of Beverly 
was among her scholars. But the name which really throws 
glory over Whitby is the name of a cowherd from whose lips, 
during the reign of Oswald, flowed the first great English song — 
that is, Caedmon, referred to elsewhere. 



The Mediaeval period embraces the several centuries separating 
the ancient and modern epochs of European history. In round 
numbers it includes all that interval of intellectual depression in 
the history of Europe, which extends from the establishment of 
barbarian supremacy in the fifth century to the revival of learning 
about the beginning of the fifteenth ; thus comprehending about 
a thousand years. By some it has been called the Dark Ages, 
and by a distinguished German theologian, the Millenium. 

The earliest literature of the Anglo-Saxons bears the impress 
of the religious culture under which it was formed. The chief 
subjects were moral, religious, historical, and didactic. Under 
the tutelage of the Church the most lasting monuments of Anglo- 
Saxon prose -literature were written in Latin, and the vernacular 
tongue was chiefly employed in translating the learned works of 
such men as Beda and Alcuin. What value it possesses is chiefly 
for its matter ; for it almost entirely wants that beauty of form 
which alone raises literature to an art. Of the poetry that came 
after Caedmon we have few remains. But we have many things 
said which show us that his poem, like all great works, gave birth 
to a number of similar ones. Aldhelm, & young man when Caed- 



98 ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE 

mon died, and afterwards Abbot of Malmesbury, united the song- 
maker to the religious poet. He was a skilled musician, and it 
is said that he had not his equal in the making or singing of 
English verse. His songs were popular in King Alfred's time, 
and a pretty story tells us that when the traders came into the 
town on the Sunday, he, in the character of a gleeman, stood on 
the bridge and sang them songs, with which he mixed up Scrip- 
ture texts and teaching. Of all the widespread poetry, we have 
now only the few poems brought together in a book preserved at 
Exeter, in another at Vercelli, and in a few leaflets of manuscripts. 
The poems in the Vercelli Book are all religious ; legends of saints 
and addresses to the soul ; those in the Exeter Book are hymns 
and sacred poems. In both there are poems of Cynewulf, whose 
work is remarkably fine. They are all Christian in tone. The 
few touches of love of nature in them dwell on gentle, not on 
savage scenery. They are sorrowful when they speak of the life 
of men : tender when thej r touch on the love of home. 

§46. Decline of the Anglo-Saxon. 
The English or Saxon speaking portion, that is, the great mass 
of the population of England down to the reign of John, has left 
few traces of its literary existence. Whoever wished to move 
among the educated and cultivated classes, and to associate with 
persons of rank, authority, or influence, found it necessary, 
though he might be descended from Alfred himself, to speak French 
in good society, and to write in French whatever he wishes good 
society to read. From the Conquest till 1200, the industry of the 
most lynx-eyed antiquary has discovered — with the exception of 
the continuation of the Saxon Chronicle — no literary record in 
Anglo-Saxon beyond a few fragments. The continuation of the 
Saxon Chronicle was made by the monks of Peterborough. It is 
not completed for the reign of Stephen, passing over several years 
sub silentio; but it records the accession of Henry II in 1154, and 
then ends abruptly. The writer or writers were perhaps unable 
to stand up longer against the then universal fashion of employing 
Latin for any serious prose work. Moreover as Saxon was no 
longer taught in schools, nor spoken in the highest circles of so- 
ciety, it had lost much of its original harmony, and precision of 
structure; and, when the annalist found himself using one inflec- 
tion for another, or dropping inflexions altogether, he may well 
have thought it high time to exchange the tongue, which seemed 



QUESTIONS 99 

to be crumbling and breaking rip, for one whose forms were fixed, 
and its grammar rational like the Latin. Little did the down- 
hearted monks anticipate the future. 

Questions. 

What Roman general was the first to visit Britain, and when? 
Who reduced the country to a Roman Province, and when? How 
long did it remain under the Romans ? 

When and how was Christianity introduced into England ? Who 
was the wife of Constantine ? 

Who were the Anglo-Saxons, and how did they come to settle 
in England ? Give an account of the Heptarchy ? 

How did the white Anglican slaves in the market-place at 
Rome lead to the Conversion of the Anglo-Saxons ? When did 
Augustin and his monks come over? 

What two centres of learning after the Conversion are men- 
tioned ? 

What was the character of the Anglo-Saxon War Songs ? The 
Anglo-Saxon Literature ? 

What was the character of the religious poetry? Who was 
Caedmon, and what did he do? 

What were the achievements of Beda and Alcuin? Their 
writings and influence? 

What did Alfred the Great do for literature in England, St. 
Dunstan and others? 

What was pure Anglo-Saxon? From what languages did it 
receive accessions ? What were the causes of its decline ? * * * 

What brought the ruling classes and the commonalty of Eng- 
land closer together ? The loss of what ? 

This put an end to what sort of nationality and intercourse? 
What sort of political interest did it give to England in relation 
to the outside world ? 

What two of the four nations encamped on British soil were 
now in a fair way of being fused into one ? 

When did the third, the Welsh, lose all pretensions or desire to 
maintain a separate literature ? In connection with the loss of 
what at the same time ? 

In spite of common interests and the multiplicity of the ties of 
blood between the two, what did the Norman on English soil and 
the Englishman still continue to do? With respect to language ? 

For whom does Layamon write ? In whose reign ? For whom 



100 ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE 

does Ormin write? What rich, poetical vocabulary do we find 
lost in Layamon ? 

What new generally intelligible words in the thirteenth century 
did the English writers and translators begin freely to introduce ? 

Through the increasing intercourse between what two classes 
of people ? What two Roberts are conspicuous examples of this 
practice ? 

Were efforts made by some to retain the French ? In behalf of 
what circles ? And to keep English for what usages and purpose ? 

What Robert, Bishop of Lincoln, may be considered the centre 
of this ? How did this break down ? 

As soon as French books appeared, what was done with them 
by English writers ? Which versions had the most readers ? In 
what proportion? Ten to one. 

In the beginning of the fourteenth century what wars occurred ? 
Between whom ? What class of Englishmen had the chief share 
of the glory in these wars? What language must this have 
tended to discredit among Englishmen of all classes ? 

By the middle of the fourteenth century English translators 
had produced a great body of English compositions, colored with 
what ? And studded with what ? 

What had the preaching of the Friars for a hundred years be- 
fore a tendency to break down? Not only between races, but 
between what else ? 

What enormous advantage did the wars give to the English ? 

What great native writers then will we find in the next period, 
choosing English for the instrument of their thoughts, and found- 
ing English literature on an imperishable basis ? 

Of what had the earlier Arthurian legends breathed ? What 
great change took place in these legends ? Produced by the infu- 
sion of what mystical legends ? Of what creed ? What was the 
Holy Graal? 



PART III 
ENGLISH LITERATURE 



§ 47. The Norman Conquest. 

THE effect of the Norman Conquest of England upon litera- 
ture is almost implied in its direct effect upon language. 
When the English tongue was thrust down to the rank of a mere 
popular dialect, it followed that, so long as its degradation lasted, 
there could be no English literature except a popular literature. 
In one sense, the effect of the Conquest was to cause a vast revival 
of learning and literary culture within the geographical bounds 
of England. In the age immediately preceding the Norman Con- 
quest her literature, whether in the native or Latin tongue, was 
certainly rich. What the English tongue was capable of, how 
great a degree of perfection it was actually reaching, can be seen 
in the English Chronicles. But at the authorship of the Chronicles 
we can only guess, and it is certain that in the course of the 
eleventh century England produced no writer personally known 
to fame. The great age of the Northumbrian literature, the great 
age of West Saxon literature, had both of them passed away 
before the coming of William the Conqueror, in 1066, before the 
coming of Knud, that is, Canute. There was no lack of activity 
in the England of the eleventh century. She had her saints, her 
statesmen and her warriors, equal to those of any other age. But 
she certainly has little to show in the way of learning or of writ- 
ten eloquence. Nor was this lack of men of learning confined to 
native Englishmen. We do not see that, among the foreigners 
whom Edward had gathered around him, he did much for the 
encouragement of learned men. 

The moment William is on the throne all this changes. Eng- 
land at once becomes the resort of the most learned of the age, 
with the two mighty ones from Bee at their head, Lanfranc and 
Anselm. The throne of the Conqueror and his scholar-son was 
surrounded with men renowned in every branch of learning, 
whether they were of Norman or of English descent. The Latin 

101 



102 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

historical literature in the twelfth century is a literature of which 
any country may be proud. In fact, it stands out in contrast to 
the utter lack of writers of any eminence in the days immediately 
before the Conquest; and besides her historians, England had her 
theologians, her poets, her philosophers, her explorers of foreign 
lands. The romance languages were now beginning to put off 
the character of mere vulgar dialects of Latin, and to take the 
form of distinct languages of literary culture. 

The Provencal tongue of Southern Gaul or France led the way, 
and the French of Northern Gaul was now ready to follow it. 
The development of the Italian language naturally came later. 
Its chief dialects had not departed nearly so far from the purity 
of the classical Latin as either of the languages of Gaul. Men 
were, therefore, slower in Italy than in France to see that the 
popular speech had really become, for practical purposes, a lan- 
guage distinct from Latin ; and one which might be cultivated 
alongside of it. In all these lands the cultivation of verse came 
before the cultivation of prose, and one can hardly doubt that in 
the development of French verse, the Normans, whether in their 
own Duchy or in England, led the way. At a later stage of the 
language, under men who had a better claim to be called French- 
men in the stricter sense, French prose gradually became a literary 
speech. Thus, alongside of the Latin literature of the twelfth 
century, the oldest French literature arose under the patronage 
of the kings who ruled on both sides of the sea . And the French 
tongue of those days was a vigorous and manly tongue. 
. In the twelfth century a crowd of Latin writers were dealing in 
prose and verse, with every branch of knowledge of which their 
age had heard . Less learned barons and ladies were listening to 
the French rimes which were set before them : sometimes Nor- 
man and English history, but more commonly French and British 
fable. Meanwhile the speech of the natives of the land, thrust 
down as it were from its former rank, still lived on, however 
lowly now was its sphere. The Chronicle itself does not die out 
till more than half the twelfth century has passed away. And 
we have English prose writings of a devotional kind, contem- 
porary with the later portions of the Chronicle. The series of 
English prose writings goes on through the century in the form 
of homilies, of translations of Scripture, of turnings of the old 
Charters into the newer form of the language. These continue, 
influenced, sometimes more and sometimes less, by the new 



THE NORMAN KINGS OF ENGLAND 103 

fashions, till English again became the one literary speech of 
England. 

The prose writings of these ages are mainly religious, and they 
give us English in various forms, according to the tastes and cir- 
cumstances of the writers ; and according to the parts of England 
in which they were written. When a bishop in the thirteenth 
century wrote a devotional book in English for a sisterhood of 
nuns, it was English with a strong dash of French about it. But 
when a Kentish priest, in the middle of the fourteenth century, 
wrote for his own flock and for men of like degree, he wrote in 
the pure Teutonic the Ayenbite of Inwyt — Remorse of Cons- 
cience. We have now reached the times when English in its 
new form finally displaced French as the polite language. The 
travels of Sir John Mandeville, the translations of the English 
Bible and other writings of Wickliffe mark the time of the final 
conquest. 

§ 48. The Norman Kings of England. 

That part of France with which England was most intimately 
connected for nearly a hundred years — from 1066 to 11 54 — after 
the Norman Conquest, was Normandy. William the Conqueror 
died in 1087, and had bequeathed Normandy to his eldest son 
Robert; but William the Red, his second son, hastened with his 
father's ring to England, where, through the influence of Arch- 
bishop Lanfranc, he secured for himself the crown. In his reign 
the Crusade commenced, in which, however, he took no part nor 
interest. He was found dead in a glade in the New Forest, shot, 
by the arrow of a hunter or of an assassin, in the breast, at the 
end of the eleventh century — A. D. 1160. 

Robert was at this moment on his return from the Holy Eand, 
where his bravery had redeemed much of his earlier ill-fame, and 
the English crown was seized by his younger brother Henry, in 
spite of the opposition of the baronage, who clung to the Duke 
of Normandy and the union of their estates on both sides of the 
Channel, under a single ruler. Their attitude threw Henry I, as 
it had thrown Rufus, on the support of the English ; and the two 
great measures which followed his coronation, his grant of a 
Charter and his marriage with Matilda, mark the new relation 
which this support brought about between the people and their 
king. Henry's Charter is important, not merely as a direct pre- 
cedent for the Great Charter of John, but as the first limitation to 



104 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

the despotism established by the Conqueror, and carried to such a 
height by his son. His marriage gave a significance to the prom- 
ises of the Charter, which the meanest English peasant could 
understand. Edith, or Matilda, was the daughter of King Mal- 
colm of Scotland and of Margaret, the sister of Eadgar, the 
Atheling. The shout of the English multitude, when Archbishop 
Anselm set the crown on Matilda's brow, drowned the murmur 
of churchman and baron. The mockery of the Norman nobles, 
who nicknamed the king and his spouse Godric and Godgifer, 
was lost in the joy of the people at large. For the first time since 
the Conquest an English sovereign sat on the English throne. 
The blood of Cerdic and Alfred was to blend itself with that of 
Rollo and the Conqueror. 

Henry I was the fourth and youngest son of William the Con- 
queror, and the only son born on English ground. As the son of 
a crowned king, and of a queen besides, he was, therefore, a born 
Atheling ; and was marked out from his birth as the future king 
of England, and was educated accordingly. He was taught all 
the learning of the age. His proficiency became wonderful 
among the contemporary princes, and Henry Beauclerc — 1068- 
1135 — as men called him, retained his taste for letters through 
the whole course of a long life and eventful reign ; and there is. 
little doubt that among the branches of learning, which were . in- 
stilled into the young Atheling, was a knowledge of the speech 
and literature of the land in which he was born. Henry I seems 
to have deserved his literary reputation, and the names of Wace, 
Gaimar, Henry of Huntingdon, Walter de Map, William of 
Malmesbury, and others who flourished at his court, or in his 
reign, threw a gleam of humanity over the barbarous age in 
which he lived. In his later life, though at some periods of his 
reign, his policy became mainly foreign; yet he never threw 
aside wholly the character of an Englishman. He married, as 
we have seen, Matilda of Scotland, but of English royal descent; 
and William, the son of that marriage, was freely spoken of as an 
English Atheling. Two campaigns — from 11 05- 11 06 — separated 
by one of Robert's fruitless visits to England, brought Normandy 
into the hands of Henry, and Duke Robert became his prisoner. 
He who had himself refused the crown of Jerusalem, and had 
twice failed of the crown of England, lived on till the year be*fore 
the long reign of his brother. For twenty-eight years he was a 
prisoner, moved from castle to castle at his brother's will, but 



THE NORMAN KINGS OF ENGLAND 105 

still treated, so at least his brother professed, with all the defer- 
ence and courtesy which his rank and his misfortunes might 
claim. 

The conquered Duchy became a dependency of the English 
crown, and Henry's energies were frittered away for a quarter of 
a century in crushing its revolts : the hostility of the French and 
the efforts of his nephew William, the son of Robert, to regain 
the crown which his father had lost. In 1120 Henry's son 
William, the Atheling, with a crowd of nobles accompanied 
Henry on his return from Normandy, but the white ship, in which 
he embarked, lingered behind the rest of the royal fleet till the 
guards of the king's treasure pressed its departure. It had 
hardly cleared the harbor when the ship's side struck on a rock, 
and in an instant it sank beneath the waves. One terrible cry 
ringing through the silence of the night was heard by the royal 
fleet ; but it was not till the morning that the fatal news reached 
the king. Stern as he was, Henry fell senseless to the ground, 
and rose never to smile again. He had no other son, and the 
circle of his foreign foes closed round him the more fiercely, now 
that William, the son of his captive brother Robert, was his nat- 
ural heir. Henry hated William, while he loved his own daugh- 
ter Maud, who had been married to the Emperor Henry the 
Fifth, but who had been restored by his death to her father's 
court. The succession of a woman was new in English history : 
it was strange to a feudal baronage. But when all hope of issue 
from a second wife whom he wedded was over, Henry forced 
priests and nobles to swear allegiance to Maud as their future 
mistress, and affianced her to Geoffrey the Handsome, the son of 
the one foe whom he dreaded, Count Fulk of Anjou. 

Henry's designation of his daughter Maud to the throne was 
never carried into effect. She cannot be said even to have been 
the queen of England. Henry died in 1135, and was succeeded 
by Stephen, who was the son of Adela, the daughter of William 
the Conqueror, and sister of Henry I. He had also married a Ma- 
tilda, the granddaughter, of Malcolm and Margaret ; and she was, 
therefore, like Matilda, Henry's first queen who was her aunt, of 
English royal descent. Stephen was a more amiable man, most 
likely he was morally a better man than his uncle, but he had none 
of his uncle's gifts for ruling a kingdom in those days. The re- 
maining nineteen years of this period of English history, though 
they are formally marked with the name of a king, were, in truth, 



106 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

a time of bitter anarchy. There was no settled form of govern- 
ment in the land, and, during the greater part of this period, the 
crown was actually disputed in arms by two rival claimants. 
Every man who had the power, and his own castle, did that which 
was right in his own eyes. By the treaty of Winchester, Stephen 
was to remain king of the English for life, but Duke Henry of 
Anjou, Matilda's son, became his adopted son and was declared 
successor. In this way Stephen's own son, William, was deprived 
of the inheritance of the English crown. After this the land en- 
joyed such a peace as it had never enjoyed before since the death 
of Henry. But this new reign was a short one: before the year 
was out, Stephen died at Canterbury, October 25, 1154. 

§ 49. The Anglo -Norman Period — 1066-1215. 

The eleventh century is remarkably barren in great names and 
memories which captivate the imagination; it was, however, an 
advance upon the tenth, which Baronius consider as the central 
and worst period of intellectual darkness. In England for about 
150 years after the Conquest there was no unity of intellectual 
life; in political life, however, the iron hand of the Conqueror 
compelled an external uniformity by the universal exaction of 
homage to himself. The strength of the Norman monarchy, the 
absence of religious differences, and, after a time, the loss of Nor- 
mandy, were causes working powerfully in aid of the conciliation 
and interfusion of the different elements of the population. But 
at first, it was as if three separate nations were encamped confusedly 
on British soil — the Normans, the English and the Welsh. The 
Clergy, as a fourth power of all nationalities, or of none — because 
by its use of Latin as a common tongue, by preaching a common 
faith and teaching a common philosophy, and as representing the 
equality and charity which are among the essential features of 
Christianity — had an ever-present mediating influence, tending to 
break down the partitions between the camps. The intellectual 
state and progress of each nation, down to a little beyond the end 
of the twelfth century, can now be only briefly discussed. 

In less than two centuries after the Northmen under Rollo had 
settled in Normandy, they had not only exchanged their Teutonic 
speech for the language of France, but had made — with French as 
the medium of expression — remarkable literary progress. In this 
progress the Normans, settled in England, participated to the full 
extent. It is probable that Turoldus — who, availing himself of 



THE ANGLO-NORMAN PERIOD 107 

earlier Frankish lays and chronicles, composed towards the end 
of the eleventh century the Chanson de Roland — was an Abbot of 
Peterborough, son of the clerk of the same name, who was the 
Conqueror's preceptor. From the reign of Henry the First, 
though the names of several writers are known, little of importance 
has come down to us. The treatise on Politeness, called Urba?ncs, 
attributed to Henry himself, is in all probability the production 
of a later age. The reign of Stephen, though confusion and civil 
war prevailed over a great part of England, witnessed an extraor- 
dinary outburst of literary activity. Of the historians who shed a 
lustre on this reign, we shall speak in a different connection, but 
it was also remarkable for its French poets. Geoffrey Gaimar — 
1 140 — wrote his lively Estorie des Engles, a chronicle of the Anglo- 
Saxon Kings ; and Benoit de Ste. More, either in this reign, or 
early in that of Henry II, produced a vast poem on the History of 
the War of Troy, which seems to have been the original exemplar 
on which the numerous Troy Books were modelled. 



Poetry was so strictly national that it clave to every ancient form 
and every ancient word. The song of Maldon is written in a 
tongue which must even then have been antiquated. Its whole dic- 
tion is as unlike that of contemporary prose as the diction of Homer 
is unlike that of Xenophon. The modern scholars feels the dif- 
ference at every step. While Old English prose has no difficulties 
which are not soon overcome by use, Old English verse has to be 
studied like a foreign language. 

No two things can be more unlike than an Old English battle 
song and a French riming chronicle of the twelfth century. The 
most spirited descriptions in the Roman de Rose, written by Wace 
in honor of William the Conqueror, are tame beside the living 
pictures of the Victory of Athelstan or the death of Brihtnoth. 
The two, in short, belong to two wholly different classes of com- 
position. The one is poetry of an archaic and traditional kind; 
the other is simply a narrative, which, for the sake of fashion and 
convenience, was thrown into easy flowing verse, while prose, if 
prose had been the fashion of the day, would have served the 
purpose just as well. 

During the reigns of William the Conqueror and of his son 
Rufus, by them and the nobility who accompanied them, Nor- 
mandy was regarded as being the true kingdom, and England 



108 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

merely as it province. But when Henry I made a conquest and 
acquired Normandy from his elder brother Robert, who had in- 
herited it from his father, then England for a while becomes the 
kingdom and Normandy the province. During this time and im- 
mediately afterwards in the reign of Stephen, it is that, although 
writing in Latin, the true English Chroniclers appear, who had 
their country at heart: Ordej'ic — 107 5-1 143 about — for instance, 
who wrote the ' ' Ecclesiastical History of England ' ' in three 
books ; and William of Malmesbury, who wrote the " History of 
English" Kings in five books, bringing it down from the arrival 
of the first English, in 449, to the twentieth year of the reign of 
Henry- 1, which was afterwards continued by him in his Historia 
Novella, or Modern History, in three short books, to the year 1142. 

Five years after Orderic and William of Malmesbury had ceased 
to write, Geoffrey of Monmouth completed his Latin "History of 
British Kings." Of these books the latter two were both dedi- 
cated to Robert, Earl of Gloucester. In one of these works 
William of Malmesbury brought Latin chronicle -writing to per- 
fection ; in the other, Geoffrey of Monmouth produced out of the 
form of the Chronicle the spirit that was to animate new forms of 
literature, and opened a spring of poetry that we find running 
through the fields of English literature in all after-time. 

Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of British Kings was a Romance 
of History — 11 47 — taking the grave form of authentic chronicle. 
" To more exact historians," he says, "he left the deeds of the 
Saxons, whom he advises to be silent about the kings of the 
Britons, since they have not the book in the British language 
which Walter, Archbishop of Oxford, brought out of Brittany." 
In this fiction we first read of Sabrina, " virgin daughter of Lo- 
crine," of Gorbuduc, whose story was the theme of the earliest 
English tragedy, of Lear and his daughters; and, above all, of 
King Arthur as the recognized hero of a national romance. 
Geoffrey himself was a Welsh priest, and was fully possessed, 
though he wrote in Latin prose, of the romantic genius of the 
Welsh or British bards. 

The regular Latin chronicler of England was scandalized at the 
pretensions of a perfectly new form of literature, a work of fancy 
dressed in the form of one of his own faithful records of events. 
But the work stirred men's imaginations. It was short, as well 
as lively, the twelve books being no longer than two of the thirteen 
books of Orderic 's Ecclesiastical History. Geoffrey Gaimar trans- 



THE ANGLO-NORMAN PERIOD 109 

lated it from the Latin into French or Anglo-Norman verse, ad- 
ding thereto the series of Saxon kings. Wace's more popular ver- 
sion into French verse soon followed, for the use of the Court, 
which supplanted that of Gaimar. 

It remained, however, for Walter Map, who, like Geoffrey of 
Monmouth, had Celtic blood in his veins and who was patronized 
by King Henry II, to arrange and harmonize and to put a Chris- 
tian soul into the entire body of the Arthurian romance. For 
this purpose he associated it with the legend of the Holy Graal. 
In introducing it, William of Malmesbury produced a series of 
five prose romances, gathered from different Celtic legends. The 
first was the Romance of the Holy Graal ; or, as it was sometimes 
called, The Romance of Joseph of Arimathea ; the second was the 
story of Merlin ; the third, the Romance of Lancelot of the Lake ; 
the fourth was the Romance of the Quest of the Holy Graal ; and 
the fifth, the Mort Artnr, or the Death of Arthur. 

The Holy Graal, or Grail, was the dish which contained the 
Pascal Lamb of the Last Supper. It was presented by Pilate to 
Joseph of Arimathea, who, at the taking down of the Saviour 
from the cross, used the dish to receive the gore of his wounds. 
Thus made doubly holy, it became a possession of inestimable 
value. After the story of Merlin, the second in the series which 
we cannot take up now, comes the third, the Romance of Lancelot 
the Lake. Lancelot is the bright pattern of a knight, according 
to the flesh, cleared, in one respect, of many scattered offenses, 
which are concentrated in a single blot, represented always as a 
dark blot, on his character, the unlawful love for Guinevere, the 
wife of Arthur. Then comes as the fourth romance in the series, 
" The Quest of the Holy Graal." From Lancelot, who had been 
painted as the ornament of an unspiritual chivalry, Map caused a 
son to spring up, Sir Galahad, the spiritual knight, whose dress 
of flame color mystically typified the Holy Spirit that came down 
in tongues of fire. Bishop Joseph, the son and namesake of 
Joseph of Arimathea, to whom the holy dish was bequeathed, 
first instituted the Order of the Round Table. The initiated at 
their festivals sat as apostle knights, with the Holy Ghost in their 
midst, leaving one seat vacant as that which the Lord had occu- 
pied, and which was reserved for the pure Galahad. Whatever 
impure man sat there the earth swallowed up. It was called, 
therefore, the Seat Perilous. When men became sinful the Holy 
Graal, visible only to pure eyes, disappeared. On its recovery, 



110 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

that is, on the recovery of the purity of the English people, de- 
pended the honor and peace of England ; but only Sir Galahad — 
who at the appointed time was brought to the knights by a 
mysterious old man clothed in white — only the unstained Sir 
Galahad succeeded in the Quest. 

Besides those of the Round Table, there were several other series 
of romances introduced from time to time into England by the 
Trouveres from Normandy, such as those of Charlemagne, the 
Geste of King Horn, and the Lay of Havelock the Dane. But 
these tales remained what those of the Arthurian cycle had been, 
before the genius of Walter Map had harmonized them with the 
spirit of his country; and, therefore, they never remained popular 
for any long time in England. They were chivalrous tales of 
but merely animal strength, courage, and passion, without any 
moral or religious sentiment interfused, to make them acceptable 
to the English. 

The reigns of the Norman and the Angevin kings constitute 
the transitional period, during which the political and social con- 
stitutions of the country gradually took that form which distin- 
guishes modern England, the England of the last six hundred 
years, from the older England of the first six hundred years of 
English history. Of this transition period the Norman stage is. 
that in which foreign elements were brought into the land ; and 
the Angevin stage is that during which those foreign elements 
were fused together with the native stock of the land and its 
people. In law, in language, in art, the same process goes on. 
By the time of Edward the First, or a little before, though the 
English tongue had not yet been finally displaced, yet it had as- 
sumed the main characteristics which distinguish its modern from 
its ancient form. 

§ 50. Modern English Poetry. 

After the Conquest nearly all writings of mark had been in 
Latin; and those books which were not in Latin were in French. 
But in the reign of King John, in the thirteenth century, we be- 
gin to find writers in English, and the earliest of these is Layamon. 
He was a priest who read the services of the Church at Ernley, in 
Worcestershire . Living in the days when Geoffrey of Monmouth 's 
Chronicle, and Wace's French metrical version of it, were new 
books in high fame among the educated and courtly, " it came to 
him in mind and his chief thought ' ' that he would tell the famous 



MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 1 1 1 

story to his countrymen in English verse. As the Latin chroni- 
clers of England had been sorely displeased with Geoffrey of 
Monmouth in his " History of British Kings," for his turning of 
history into a romance, so also is Mr. Freeman, of our own time, 
in his History of the Norman Conquest for the same reason very 
much displeased, not only with Geoffrey of Monmouth, but also 
with Layamon for continuing afterwards that same deception of 
history, and with the people oi Layamon 's day for forgetting that 
they were Englishmen. 

§ 51 . The Race of the Angevin Kings. 
The British Angevin, or Plantagenet Kings, are as follows : 

Henry II, from n 54-1 189. 
Richard I, from 1 189-1 199. 
John, from 11 99-1 2 16. 
Henry III, from 12 16-1273. 

The first period of the reign of Henry II, the first Plantagenet, 
consists of his first ten years of remarkable prosperity, in which 
he zealously labored for the restoration of peace. A few years 
enabled him, as it had his grandfather, to bring all the castles of 
the realm, with their lords, into his obedience. 

The second period of Henry's reign is the period of his dispute 
with Thomas a Becket. In estimating the parts of the two great 
actors in the strife, we may well repeat the words of Herbert, 
an ardent admirer of the Archbishop, that both disputants had 
a zeal for God ; nor can we wonder at his adding, that the zeal 
which was according to knowledge none but God could know. 

The death of Thomas a. Becket brought on the third period of 
the reign of Henry from 1 1 70 to 1189 Even before the Archbishop 's 
death disputes had arisen between the king and his newly-crowned 
son, and quarrels between the father and his sons fill up a great 
space in the remaining history of his reign. The Lady of 
Aquitane, with the fiery blood of the South in her veins, could not 
bear the infidelities of her husband with the same meekness as 
good Queen Maud. The career of Eleanor, sometimes imprisoned 
by her husband, sometimes stirring up her sons and his other 
enemies against him, is something novel and strange after the three 
different forms of wife-like virtue, which we have seen in the three 
former Matildas. The outraged wife, the rebellious sons, the 



112 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

jealous over-lord, vassals and subjects revolting on every pretext, 
fill up the remaining nineteen years of a reign which began so 
brightly. 

Henry had already inherited the French counties of Anjou and 
Maine from his father Geoffrey Plantagenet ; he married Eleanor, 
the Duchess of Aquitane, and thus became virtually master of 
nearly all Southern France ; he was Duke of Normandy in right 
of his mother, and his accession to the throne of England on 
Stephen's death made him one of the greatest sovereigns in the 
world of his day. 

Richard, who succeeded his father as king of England, only used 
his realm to gather money for a Crusade, or war for the rescue 
of Jerusalem from the Mohammedans, which he had vowed to 
undertake with King Philip of France. Philip and he, however, 
quarrelled at their first exploit at Acre, and on the capture of 
the city the French king returned home, while Richard then led 
his troops to the siege of Jerusalem. 

On his return from the crusade, Richard was taken prisoner by 
the Duke of Austria. He bought his release only to find King- 
Philip attacking his French dominions : and to plunge into weari- 
some and indecisive wars, in the midst of which he was slain at 
the castle of Chaluz in 1199. 

His brother John who followed him on the throne was a vile 
and weak ruler, under whom the great sovereignty, built up by 
Henry the Second, broke utterly down. Normandy, Maine and 
Anjou were reft from him by Philip of France, and only Aquitane 
remained on that side of the sea. In England his lust and oppres- 
sion drove people and nobles to join in the resistance to him ; and 
their resistance found a great leader in the Archbishop of Canter- 
bury, Stephen Lang-ton. He lived from 1199-1216. 

The latter part of the reign of John and almost the whole reign 
of his son Henry III — from 12 16-127 2 — was a struggle between 
king and people for the confirmation and development of the 
rights embodied in the Great Charter. Politically it was a time 
of much misgovernment and trouble, a trouble which ended at last 
in the great outbreak called the Barons' War. But socially and 
religiously it was a time of vast progress. England grew richer 
and more vigorous, the Universities became great centres of learn- 
ing and education, art flourished, and religion was revived by the 
energies of the Friars. The Friars were the missionaries of the 
towns which were now rising in importance. They were mendi 



THE RACE OF THE ANGEVIN KINGS 1 1 3 

cants, who had assumed the extreme vow of poverty. Rejecting 
personal property, they fixed themselves by choice in the most 
squalid parts of the towns, begging their daily bread from door to 
door, and preaching as they went along. At first they were con- 
fessors and preachers. Presently they became scholars, and they 
had a large share in the increased intellectual activity of the age ; 
and their influence in the establishment of the Universities at Ox- 
ford and Cambridge, which were soon thronged with crowds of 
masters and scholars, was very considerable. But the intellectual 
life of this mendicant order did not last long. The members fell 
away from their first love, and they became even more corrupt 
than the older orders which stood above them in position ; how- 
ever, the Universities just mentioned have continued to live and 
flourish — down to the present day. 

Under Henry II, whose ceaseless and enlightened energy stimu- 
lated productions wherever it was exerted, French took an even 
bolder sweep. Robert Wace, a native of Jersey, and a clerk of 
Caen, composed, about 1155, his famous Brut d ' Angleterre , a his- 
tory of the kings of Britain from Brutus to Cadwallader, founded 
on the Historia Britonum of Geoffrey of Monmouth. Again, when 
Henry had commissioned Benoit to write a metrical history of the 
Dukes of Normandy, the quick-witted Wace produced — 1 160 — the 
first part of the Roman de Rou, treating of the same subject. 

Thus far we have treated of the Anglo-Norman poets chiefly as 
chroniclers : we have now to regard them as romance writers. It 
is true that in their hands history slides into romance, and vice versa ; 
thus the Brut d ' Angleterre may be regarded as historical in so far 
as it treats of the series of British kings, mythical as that series 
itself may be ; but as a romance, in most of that portion of it which 
is devoted to the adventures of Arthur. We here enter upon a 
wide field: the stories of Arthurian, Carlovingian , and general 
chivalrous romance suggest themselves to the mind ; a thousand 
interesting inquiries present themselves ; but the limits traced for 
us prescribe a treatment little more than allusive. The French 
romance can only be described in virtue of the stimulating and 
suggestive effect which it had on English writers. This effect was 
produced in a measure by great poems like the Alexandrines — 1200 
— by the original French romances on Charlemagne and his peers, 
and by that on the third Crusade and the prowess of King Richard. 
But the romances relating to Arthur, doubtless on account of the 
extent to which they really sprang from British soil, were those 
9 



114 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

which most profoundly stirred the British mind. It is not difficult 
to trace the steps by which the legends grew. Gildas, writing in 
the sixth century, knows of Arthur's victory at Mount Badon, 
but does not name him. Nennius, whose date is uncertain, but 
who should probably be assigned to the ninth century, mentions 
the same victory as one of several which were gained by the 
magnanimous Arthur over the Saxon invaders. Three centuries 
pass, and the story comes to us again greatly amplified in the British 
History of Geoffrey of Monmouth — 1126. This history, Geoffrey 
assures us, "was founded on a book in the Breton language, brought 
over from Brittany by an archdeacon from Oxford." Ritson 
scouted the assertion as fictitious, yet it was probably true ; and 
the supposition of a Breton origin for this history is exactly what 
would best account for the great development, which we find the 
Arthur legend to have now attained in comparison with the age 
of Nennius. For Brittany was the fruitful parent of numberless 
forms of imaginative fiction, a trait thus noticed by Chaucer : 

These old gentel Bretons in their daies 
Of divers aventures maden laies. 

And what character would the Breton bards be more likely to em- 
bellish than that of the hero king, who, during and before the 
migration of their forefathers, had made such a gallant stand 
against the Saxon? Yet, though Geoffrey has so much to tell us 
of Arthur, he is silent about the Round Table. That splendid 
feature of the legend first appears in the Brut of Wace, and was 
probably derived from Breton poems or traditions to which 
Geoffrey had no access. Layamon reproduces it, with additional 
details, in his version of Wace. Other branches of Arthurian 
romance, especially those relating to Tristam and Isoldi, became 
about this time widely popular ; and it is to this period also that 
Le Chevalier au Lyon of Chrestien de Troyes belongs. Suddenly 
there is a great change. A cycle of romances, which till now had 
breathed only of revenge, slaughter, race-hatred, unlawful love, 
magic, and witchcraft, becomes transformed in a few years into 
a series of mystical legends, symbolizing and teaching one of the 
profound est dogmas of the Catholic creed. This strange effect 
was produced by the infusion, into the Arthur legend, of the 
conception of the St. Graal, the holy vessel used by Christ at the 
Last Supper, containing drops of His blood, which Joseph of 
Arimathea was said to have brought into Britain. This trans- 
formation seems to have been executed by Walter Map, the re- 



THE RACE OF THE ANGEVIN KINGS 1 1 5 

niarkable Welshman, whose genius decisively colors the intellec- 
tual history of the last forty years of the twelfth century. Map is 
said to have written a Latin history of the Graal, which is not 
now extant ; yet from it all the authors of the French prose ro- 
mances on Arthur and the Saint Graal, which appeared between 
1 1 70 and 1230, profess to have translated their compositions. 
The chief of these works are The Saint Graal, Merlin, The Quest 
of the Saint Graal and Mort Artur. In all, to achieve the " Saint 
Graal," that is, to find or see the holy vessel, which, on account 
of the sin of men, had long since vanished from Britain, is rep- 
resented as the height of chivalrous ambition; but among all 
Arthur's knights only Sir Galahad, the son of Lancelot, is suf- 
ficiently pure in heart to be favored with the sublime vision. 
English versions more or less literal of these romances, among 
which may be named the works of Orderic and Sir Thomas 
Malory, and the alliterative poem of Joseph of Arimathea, attest 
the great enduring popularity of the Graal form of the Arthurian 
legend. 

As one man from the banks of the Severn, born of a foreign 
father, writing in a foreign tongue, never lost his English heart, 
his love for England or her history, so it was another man by the 
banks of the Severn who first taught the English tongue to bear 
witness against itself, and degraded it to become the channel of 
those wicked fables, which in the minds of so many Englishmen 
have displaced alike the true history and the worthier legends of 
our fathers. The opposite to Orderic, born at Atcham in 1075, is 
Layamon of Ernley. He had read the English book of Baeda and 
the Latin book of Austin, but he turned from them to the book 
that a French clerk made, that was Eustace Wace — 11 24-1 174. 
Wace truly could write well ; we blame him not for writing ; nor 
do we blame the noble Eleanor, that was Henry's Queen, for 
hearkening to what he wrote. It was proper that the Duchess of 
Aquitaine and the Canon of Bayeux should seek to know some- 
thing of the past days of the Island ; and if ill luck threw the 
monstrous fables of Geoffrey in their way, the blame was his and 
not theirs. It was no crime in Wace to write a Brut in French ; 
but it was treason against the tongue and history of his race for 
Layamon to translate that Brut into English. Times had indeed 
changed ' ' since the days when the gleemen of England sang how 
West Saxons hewed the fliers mightily with mill -sharp swords, and 



116 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

how Mercians shrank not from the hard hand-play." Then every 
national triumph awoke the thought of earlier triumphs, and as 
Scot and Northman fled before the sword of King and Atheling, 
men thought of the old books which told how Angles and Saxons 
came from the Bast over the broad sea, how they overcame the 
Welsh, and got them a land to dwell in. In the tenth century, 
men knew that they were Englishmen ; at the beginning of the 
thirteenth, some of them at least had forgotten it. To the man 
that translated the French Brut, his own folk had become Saxish 
people and heathen hounds ; and Athelstan, the lord of Earls, the 
giver of bracelets, is in his hands changed into an invader from 
beyond the sea. All trace of national feeling must have gone 
from the heart of the man, who could waste so many words of good 
English speech upon the silly tales of Brut and Arthur. 

The first sinner had his following: he had done his work. To 
the mass of Englishmen Arthur and his fantastic company seem 
more their own than Hengist and Cerdic . We see what the coming 
of the stranger had done : it had rooted out the truest memories of 
the national life. Fancy for a moment a Brut sung at the court 
of Athelstan, or even at the court of the denationalized Eadward. 
Even at that court men would not have displaced the heroes of 
the English name for the fancied glories of an enemy, whose name 
neither Baeda nor the Chroniclers thought it worth while to record. 
From the Brut of L,ayamon we turn with pleasure to the contem- 
porarv "Proverbs," which, by a pardonable fiction, bear the name 
of Alfred. If they prove nothing else, they at least prove that 
even then there were Englishmen by whom the name and the 
w T orth of the greatest of Englishmen were not forgotten. 

Another of the early pieces of Transition English, of much in- 
terest to students of the language, but of slight interest as litera- 
ture, is the Ancren Riwle, Rule of the Anchoresses, which seems 
to have been written by Bishop Simon of Ghent, who died in 1297. 
It was intended for the guidance of a small household of women, 
withdrawn from work for the service of God, at Tarrant-Kaines, 
in Dorsetshire — Kaines, Kaineston, or Kingston. 

A writer named Ormin, or Orm, began, also, in the reign of 
King John, another English poem of considerable length, called, 
from his own name, the Ormulum. He tells of himself in the 
dedication of his book that he was a regular Canon of the Order 
of St. Augustine, and that he wrote in English at the request of 
Brother Walter, also an Augustinian Canon, for the spiritual 



THE RACK OF THE ANGKVIN KINGS 117 

improvement of his countrymen. The plan of his book is to give 
to the English people in their own tongue, in an attractive form, 
the spiritual import of the Church Services throughout the year. 
He gave first a metrical paraphrase of the Gospel assigned to each 
day, and added to each portion of it a metrical homily, in which 
it was expounded doctrinally and practically, with frequent bor- 
rowing from the writings of Aelfric, and some borrowing from 
Beda. The metre is in alternate verses of eight and seven syl- 
lables, in imitation of a I^athi rhythm; or in lines of fifteen syl- 
lables, with a metrical point at the end of the eighth, thus : 

This boc iss netnmned Ormulum, 
Forrthi that Orm itt wrohhte. 

Of the homilies, provided for nearly the whole of the yearly ser- 
vice, nothing remains beyond the thirty -second, and there is no 
allusion that points to the time when the work was written. Its 
language, however, places it with the earliest examples of Transi- 
tion English, or to the first years of the reign of Henry III — 1207- 
1272. It seems to be the Transition English of a northeastern 
country, and the author had a peculiar device of spelling, on the 
adherence to which by copyists he laid great stress. Its purpose 
evidently was to guide any half-Normanized town-priest in the 
right pronunciation of the English, when he read these verses 
aloud for the pleasure and good of the people. After every short 
vowel, and only then, Orm doubled the consonant. 

— Morley's History of English Literature. 



In the heart of the Briton border, in the debatable land be- 
tween France and Brittany, dwelt Tortulf, the Forester, half- 
brigand, half-hunter, as the gloomy days went, living in free out- 
law fashion in the woods about Rennes. Tortulf had learned in 
his rough forest school ' ' how to strike the foe ; to sleep on the 
bare ground ; to bear hunger and toil, summer's heat and winter's 
frost; and how to fear nothing save ill-fame." Following King 
Charles the Bald in his struggle with the Danes, the woodman 
won broad lands along the Loire ; and his son Ingelger, who had 
swept the Northmen from Touraine and the land to the west, 
which they had burned and wasted into a vast solitude, became 
the first Count of Anjou. But the tale of Tortulf and Ingelger is 
a mere creation of some twelfth century Jongleur. 

The earliest Count whom history recognizes is Fulk the Red. 



118 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

He attached himself to the Dukes of France who were now draw- 
ing nearer to the throne, and in 888 received from them in guer- 
don the western portion of Anjou, which lay across the Mayenne. 
The story of his son is a story of peace, breaking like a quiet idyl 
the war storms of his house. Alone of all his race, Fulk the 
Good waged no wars ; his delight was to sit in the choir of Tours 
and to be called "Canon." On Martinmas Eve Fulk was sing- 
ing there in clerkly guise, when the French king, Louis D'Outre- 
mer, entered the church. " He sings like a priest," laughed the 
King, as his nobles pointed mockingly to the figure of the Count- 
Canon. But Fulk was ready with his reply. " Know, my lord," 
retorted the Count of Anjou, "that a king unlearned is a crowned 
ass." He was in fact no priest, but a busy ruler, governing, 
enforcing peace, and carrying justice to every corner of the 
waste land. To him alone of his race, men gave the title of "the 
Good." 

Hampered by revolt, himself in character little more than a 
bold, dashing soldier, Fulk's son, Geoffrey or Grey-Tunic, sank 
almost into a vassal of his powerful neighbors, the Counts of Blois 
and Champagne. But this vassalage was roughly shaken off by 
his successor. Fulk Nerra, or the Black, is the greatest of the 
Angevins ; the first, in whom we can trace that marked type of 
character, which their house was to preserve through two hundred 
years. He was without natural affection. In his youth he burned 
a wife at the stake, and legend told how he led her to her doom, 
decked out in his gayest attire. In his old age he waged his 
bitterest war against his son, and exacted from him when van- 
quished a humiliation which men reserved for the deadliest of 
their foes. "You are conquered, you are conquered!" shouted 
the old man in fierce exultation, as Geoffrey, bridled and saddled 
like a beast of burden, crawled for pardon to his father's feet. In 
Fulk first appeared that low type of superstition, which startled 
even superstitious ages in the early Plantagenets . Robber as he 
was of Church lands, and contemptuous of ecclesiastical censures, 
the fear of the end of the world drove Fulk to the Holy Sepulchre. 
Barefoot and with the strokes of the scourge falling heavily on his 
shoulders, the Count had himself dragged by a halter through the 
streets of Jerusalem, and courted the doom of martyrdom by his 
wild outcries of penitence. ***•■*** 

At Fulk's accession in 987, Anjou was the least important of the 
greater provinces of France. At his death in 1040 it stood, if not 



THE RACE OF THE ANGEVIN KINGS 119 

in extent, at least in real power, first among them all. Cool- 
headed, clear-sighted, quick to resolve, quicker to strike, Fulk's 
career was one long series of victories over all his rivals. He was 
a consummate general, and he had the gift of personal bravery, 
which was denied to some of his greatest descendants. There was 
a moment in the first of his battles when the day seemed lost for 
Anjou : a feigned retreat of the Bretons drew the Angevin horse- 
men into a line of hidden pitfalls, and the Count himself was flung 
heavily to the ground. Dragged from the medley of men and 
horses, he swept down almost singly on the foe asa" storm -wind ' ' 
■ — so rang the paean of the Angevins — ' ' sweeps down on the thick 
corn-rows ; " and the field was won. But to these qualities of the 
warrior, he added a power of political organization, a capacity for 
far-reaching combinations, a faculty of statesmanship which be- 
came the heritage of his race, and lifted them as high above the 
intellectual level of their time as their shameless wickedness de- 
graded them below the level of other men. One after another, 
he completed his conquests in the South, and soon after in the 
North. " Touraine was won bit by bit till only Tours resisted 
the Angevins." * * * * * 

Fulk's work of conquest was completed by his son Geoffrey 
Martel, who wrested Tours from the Count of Blois, and by the 
seizure of Le Mans brought his border to the Norman frontiers. 
Here, however, his advance was checked by the genius of William 
the Conqueror, and with his death the greatness of Anjou came for 
awhile to an end. Stripped of Maine by the Normans and broken 
by dissensions within, the weak and profligate rule of Fulk Nerra 
left Anjou powerless. But in 1109 it woke to fresh energy with 
the accession of his son, Fulk of Jerusalem — now urging the tur- 
bulent Norman nobles to revolt, now supporting Robert's son, 
William, in his strife with his uncle, offering himself throughout 
as the loyal supporter of the French kingdom, which was now 
hemmed in on almost every side by the forces of the English king 
and of his allies, the Counts of Blois and Champagne. Fulk was 
the one enemy whom Henry the First really feared. It was to 
disarm his restless hostility that the king gave the hand of Matilda 
to Geoffrey the Handsome. But the hatred between Norman and 
Angevin had been too bitter to make such a marriage popular, 
and the secrecy with which it was brought about was held by the 
barons to free them from the oath they had previously sworn. * * 

Henry found a more pressing danger in the greed of her hus- 



120 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

band Geoffrey, whose habit of wearing the common broom of 
Anjou, the Plania Ge?iistae, in his helmet, gave him the title of 
Plantagenet. His claims ended at last with his intrigues with the 
Norman nobles, and Henry hurried to the border to meet the 
Angevin invasion; but the plot broke down at his presence, the 
Angevins retired, and at the close of 1135 the old king withdrew 
to the Forest of Lyons to die.' " God give him," wrote the Arch- 
bishop of Rouen from Henry's death-bed, "the peace he loved." 
With him, indeed, closed the long peace of the Norman rule. 
An outburst of anarchy followed the news of his departure, and. 
in the midst of the turmoil appeared at the gates of London, Karl 
Stephen, his nephew, a son of the Conqueror's daughter, Adela, 
who had married a Count of Blois. * * * * 

— Green's History of the English People. 

§ 52. Monastic Chronicles . 

In the year following the Norman Conquest the chief authors 
were eccleciastics and the language Latin. The books were 
usually Chronicles and Lives of Saints ; but there were representa- 
tions also of the love of travel, and already a faint indication of 
the spirit of free inquiry that on some day in the future was to 
break the bonds of ancient science. We have Monastic Chronicles 
in the reign of William the Conqueror — 1066- 1087 — and of Wil- 
liam Rufus — 1 08 7- 1 1 00 — but they were at their best in that of 
the Henrys. They record the deeds of the history-makers, sing 
the glories of their war chiefs through English bards and glee- 
men. The history-making Normans gave from the first much 
occupation for the good monk — William of Malmesbury — in his 
Scriptorium. In that room he copied the desirable things that were 
not bought for the Monastic Library: the works of the Fathers, 
writings in defense of orthodox belief ; a good book on the right, 
computation of Easter ; a treatise on the seven steps of knowledge, 
which led up to theology, namely, Grammar, Rhetoric, and Logic, 
forming the Trivium of Ethics; with Arithmetic, Geometry, 
Music, and Astronomy, the Quadrivium of Physics. 

There would be need also of a fresher history than Orderic could, 
furnish. The framer of such a history might begin with Adam, 
and write a short sketch of the History of the World from the 
Creation, to be copied; or a large history, to be reduced in scale. 
As William proceeded toward his own time, he would give out, 
now this and now that accepted history of a particular period, to be 



MONASTIC CHRONICLES 121 

copied literally or to be condensed. But when he came down to the 
period of his own memory, or that of men about him, he began to 
tell his stor}^ for himself and spoke from living knowledge ; and 
from this point, therefore, his chronicles of after- times form an in- 
dependent record of great value. We will mention only one of the 
several chroniclers in the reign of Henry I . William of Malmes- 
bury was born probably about the year 1095 ; and of his parents, 
one was English and one Norman. He went as a boy into the 
Monastery of Malmesbury ; was known there as an enthusiast for 
books ; he sought, bought and read them ; and gave all the intervals 
between religious exercises to his active literary work. He was 
made librarian at Malmesbury, but he would not be made an Abbot. 

Robert, Earl of Gloucester, the natural son of Henry I, who 
fought afterward for his sister against Stephen, was a man of 
refined taste among the nobles, at that time, the great patrons of 
letters. To him William of Malmesbury dedicated his chief work, 
namely, The History of the Kings of England — De Gestis Regum — 
as well as other writings . The history of these English Kings is 
in five books, beginning with the first arrival of the Anglo-Saxons 
in 449 ; reaching to the Norman Conquest by the close of the 
second book ; giving the third book to William the Conqueror ; 
the fourth to William Rufus ; and the fifth to Henry I , as far as 
the twentieth year of his reign. Under a separate title, Historia 
Novella, Modern History, at the request of Robert of Gloucester, 
he continued his record of current events, in three short books, 
to the year 1142, when he broke off in the story of his patron's 
contest with King Stephen — at Matilda's escape over the ice 
from Oxford to Wallingford. "This," he said, "I propose de- 
scribing more fully, if, by God's permission I shall ever learn the 
truth of it from those who were present." As he wrote no more, 
the time of his death is inferred from the date of the conclusion 
of his history, in 1142, when his age was about forty-seven. 

We now pass from the literature of the reign of Henry I to that 
of Stephen — 1135-1154 — remembering that the last seven years 
of the work of William of Malmesbury fall within Stephen's reign. 
Five years after William had ceased to write, Geoffrey of Mon- 
mouth compiled his Latin History of British Kings. The patron of 
William of Malmesbury was the patron also of Geoffrey of Mon- 
mouth : the ' ' History of the Kings of England ' ' and the ' ' History 
of British Kings " are both dedicated to Robert, Earl of Glouces- 
ter. In one of his works, William of Malmesbury brought chronicle 



122 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

writing to perfection ; in the other, Geoffrey of Monmouth produced 
out of the form of the chronicles the spirit that was to animate 
new forms of literature, and open a spring of poetry which we find 
running through the field of English literature in all after-time. 

§ 53. Geoffrey of Monmouth. 

Geoffrey was a Welsh priest, in whom there was the blood of the 
Cymric or Celtic race quickening his genius. He had made a trans- 
lation of the Prophecies of Merlin, which, as he tells us, Walter 
Calenius, Archdeacon of Oxford, had written in the Cymric tongue. 
Walter knew no man better able to translate it than Geoffrey of 
Monmouth, who had credit as an elegant writer of L,atin verse 
and prose. Geoffrey, therefore, undertook the task and wrote 
accordingly his History of British Kings, in four books, dedicated 
to Robert, Karl of Gloucester,. Afterwards he made alterations, 
and formed the work into eight books : the whole work was a 
romance, taking the grave form of authentic history. Geoffrey 
closed his budget with playful reference to more exact historians, 
to whom he left the deeds of the Saxons, but whom he advised 
"to be silent about the kings of the Britons, since they have not 
that book in the British language, which Walter, Archdeacon of 
Oxford, had brought out of Brittany." 

From this mysterious book, upon which Geoffrey fathered his 
invention, he gives a list of British kings who did wonderful 
deeds ; gave their names to this and that place ; tells how each of 
them reigned, exactly so many years and months; and made an 
unbroken series from Brutus, great-grandson of Aeneas, through 
King Arthur to Cadwallon, who died in the year 689. We first 
read in this fiction of Sabrina, "virgin daughter of Locrine;" of 
Gorboduc, whose story was the theme of the earliest English 
tragedy; of I^ear and his daughter; and, above all, of King 
Arthur as the recognized hero of a national romance. The regu- 
lar chronicler was scandalized at the pretensions of a perfectly 
new form of literature ; a work of fancy dressed in the form of 
one of his own faithful records of events. But the work stirred 
men's imaginations. It was short as well as lively: the twelve 
books being no longer than two of the thirteen books of Orderic's 
Ecclesiastical History. 

"It was in the year 1145," says Mr. Nutt, "that Geoffrey of 
Monmouth first made the legendary history of Britain accessible 
to the lettered class of England and the Continent. He thereby 



THE HOLY GRAAL 123 

opened up to the world at large a new sentiment of romantic story, 
and exercised on the development of literature an influence com- 
parable in its kind to that of the Columbus achievement upon the 
course of geographical discovery and political effort. Twenty 
years had not passed before the British heroes were household 
names throughout Europe ; and by the close of the century nearly 
every existing literature had assimilated and reproduced the story 
of Arthur and his knights, of Charlemagne and Alexander the 
Great. The tale of imperial Rome itself, though still affording 
subject-matter to the wandering Jongleur, or the mawkish annalist, 
pales before the issue of the British kings." 

The instinct, which led the twelfth and thirteenth centuries thus 
to place the Arthurian story above all others, was a true one. It 
was charged with the spirit of romance, and they were preeminently 
the ages of the romantic temper. 

Maistre Wace was born in Jersey, educated at Caen, and was a 
reading clerk and romance writer at Caen in the latter part of 
Stephen's reign. He shared the enthusiasm with which men of 
bright imagination received Geoffrey of Monmouth's Chronicle, 
and he reproduced it as a French metrical romance ; the Brut, in 
more than 15,000 lines. Sometimes he translated closely, some- 
times paraphrased, sometimes added fresh legends from Brittany, 
or fresh inventions of his own. His work was completed in 1 155, 
immediately after the accession of Henry II. 

§ 54. The Holy Graal. 

Walter Map, like Geoffrey of Monmouth, had Celtic blood in 
his veins — born about the year 1143, on the borders of Wales. 
He first conceived the idea of arranging all the different legends 
relating to Arthur in one harmonious whole ; and to lend a kind of 
spiritual significance to the story, he determined to associate with 
it the favorite Christian legend of the Holy Graal, or Holy Dish, 
which, it is said, contained the Paschal Lamb, when Christ cele- 
brated His Last Passover. 

The Round Table is not mentioned in Geoffrey of Monmouth's 
History of Britain. The notable addition to the legend is first 
introduced by Wace into his French metrical romance, the Brut, 
he having received it, no doubt, from some source in Brittany 
unknown to Geoffrey of Monmouth or Walter Calenius. There 
were at different times three tables : the first was the one at which 
the Last Supper was eaten ; the second was made by Joseph of 



124 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Arimathea, and upon it was placed the Holy Graal ; the third was 
made by Uther, who with Pendragon on one side and the Saxon 
invaders on the other, had fought in the great battle of Salisbury 
Plain : this being made in accordance with doctrines from Merlin, 
and in the name of the Trinity. This last table was set up at 
Cardw r ell, in Wales, and the feasting around it was the occasion 
of great events. Among the noble company, which were accus- 
tomed to sit at this table, were Gorlois, Duke of Cornwall, and his 
fair wife Igerna. Uther becoming enamored of the lady was 
enabled through the assistance of the Magician Merlin to visit her 
in her castle, disguised as her husband Gorlois. Their son was 
Arthur, who, as soon as he was born, was given into the care of 
Merlin to be cared for and educated. The boy was kept in ignor- 
ance of his high descent until the death of Uther. Then he was 
crowned, and after reigning many years was married to Guinevere, 
■ ' the fairest woman in the land. ' ' Having obtained the enchanted 
table which had been set up at Card well, he founded a new order 
of knighthood, called that of the Round Table ; and among the 
noble knights were Sir Lancelot of the Lake, Sir Tristram of 
Lyonesse, Sir Gawain, Sir Mordred, Sir Galahad, Sir Percivale, 
and others. 

All these having vowed to live uprightly, to deal justly, and 
to preserve their souls in purity, sat at their festival, wdth the 
Holy Ghost in their midst, one seat vacant as that which the 
Lord had occupied, and which was reserved for that one of them 
which was without sin . This seat was called the ' ' Seat Peril- 
ous, ' ' and whatever impure man sat thereon was swallowed up by 
the earth. The Holy Graal, which Joseph of Arimathea had so 
long ago brought to Britain, had disappeared ; and on its recovery- 
depended the honor and peace of the country. But, being visi- 
ble only to pure eyes, none of the knights succeeded in the quest 
save Sir Galahad, and to him was awarded the honor of sitting in 
the Seat Perilous. Of the wonderful series of exploits, of the 
adventures at home and abroad of these heroes, and of the various 
episodes so skillfully woven into the narrative, our space will not 
permit us to speak. The story ends b}^ relating the treason of 
Sir Mordred who allies himself wdth the invading Saxons. A 
great battle is fought in Cornwall on the River Camlan, and Arthur 
is slain at the hands of the traitor. 



ARTHURIAN ROMANCES 125 

§ 55. Arthurian Romances. 

The Trouveres of Northern France who catered for energetic 
men, ilfy satisfied with the mere love of the music of the Southern 
Troubadours, had tales no doubt of Arthur, Merlin and Lancelot, 
which had been partly founded upon Cymbric traditions. The 
old tales were tales of animal strength, courage and passion. The 
spiritual life was added to them when Walter Map — probably from 
1140-1210 — placed in them the Holy Graal type of the heavenly 
mysteries. He it was who first gave a soul to the Ki?ig Arthur 
Legeyids, and from whom we date the beginning of a spiritual 
harmony between the life of the English people and the forms 
given to the national hero by the English poets. The Latin races 
had made no such use of Charlemagne or Roland as we shall find 
the English to have made of the King Arthur myth. The cycle 
of the Charlemagne romances offers a wide field for study, bright 
with life and color, derived from the active genius of the Trou- 
veres. But these tales remain what those of the Arthurian circle 
were before the genius of Walter Map had harmonized them with 
the spirit of his country. 

The Chronicle of Geoffrey of Monmouth, who lived probably 
from the year noo to 1152, had suddenly made King Arthur 
famous in England. Wace's romance had quickened the interest 
in his adventures, and then it seemed to have occurred to Walter 
Map, or to have been suggested to him, to arrange and harmonize, 
and to put a Christian soul into the entire body of Arthurian Ro- 
mance. For this purpose he would associate it with the Legend of 
the Holy Graal, referred to above, and that legend became the series 
of prose romances, now produced and written to be read aloud, 
forming the groundwork on which metrical romances were after- 
wards based. These French prose romances seem to have been 
translated from Latin originals, and Robert de Borron, to whom it is 
ascribed, may have been the author of the first of the series — The 
Romance of the Holy Graal, sometimes also called The Ro?nance of 
Joseph of Arimathea, which was written at least twenty years later 
than Geoffrey of Monmouth's Chronicle. It is professedly told by 
a hermit, to whom in the year 717 appeared in England a vision 
of Joseph of Arimathea and the Holy Graal. The hermit set 
down in Latin what was then revealed to him, and his Latin, 
Robert de Borron said that he proposed to set down in French. 
The Graal, according to the legend, was the Holy Dish which con- 



126 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

tained the Paschal Lamb at the Last Supper. After the Supper it 
was taken by a Jew to Pilate, who gave it to Joseph of Arimathea 
at the taking down of our Lord from the Cross, to receive the gore 
from his wounds, and thus it became doubly sacred. When the 
Jews imprisoned Joseph, the Holy Graal, placed miraculously in 
his hands, kept him from pain and hunger for two and forty years. 
Released by Vespasian, Joseph quitted Jerusalem and went with 
the Graal through France and Britain, where it was carefully 
deposited in the treasury of one of the kings of the island, called 
the Fisherman King. The Latin adaptation of this legend to the 
purpose it was to serve, with the addition of the Graal as a type 
of the mystery of godliness to the mere animal life of the King 
Arthur romances, we may suppose to have been the work ot 
Walter Map. 

Of all the romantic heroes of mediaeval times few stand higher, 
at any rate in the estimation of Englishmen, than King Arthur 
and the Knights of the Round Table, although they scarcely 
belong to authentic history at all. He is merely mentioned by 
Hume as a prince of the Silures, or of the people of Southern 
Wales, called in by the Southern Bretons in their extremity to 
assist them against the invading Saxons, whose heroic valor, 
sustained for a while the declining fate of his country. The first 
person who threw a charm around this king and his colleagues, 
and brought them forth into wider notice and popularity, was 
Geoffrey of Monmouth, of whom we have spoken before, who 
wrote in Latin prose the ' ' History of the Britons. ' ' In his pleasant 
old History we are struck with his correct ' ' keeping throughout 
the whole." In this he differs from most of the Norman-French 
Romancers among whom he lived and moved . When treating of 
the heroes of antiquity they always bring them down to their own 
present chivalrous times, to "the castle life" of the twelfth and 
thirteenth centuries. They represent Hector as setting lance in 
rest, and Alexander summoning his feudatories to a "parlement;" 
and Olympias, with Merlin on wrist, daintily ambling along 
tapestry-decked streets . In the BattelL of Jerusalem by Adam Davie, 
Pilate is represented as challenging our Lord to single combat. 
Throughout the whole narrative of Geoffrey of Monmouth, how- 
ever, we find nothing of this sort. Everything is in keeping, 
and is suitable to the age. Even when he enters upon Christian 
times in history, and describes the coronation and mighty feasts of 



ARTHURIAN ROMANCES 127 

Arthur at Caerleon, the forms are those of ancient Welsh manners, 
very different from those he must have witnessed at the English 
court. It is worthy of notice, too, that, although he assigns a 
proud and most ancient origin to London, he never exhibits Arthur 
holding his court there, but always at Caerleon, a city certainly 
still retaining many relics of Roman magnificence, but which had 
then fallen into complete decay. Now to the homesick exiles in 
Brittany, Caerleon, the most important city of the West, would 
likely enough come to be viewed as King Arthur's own city. 
As King of the Silures, all his battles against the Saxons were 
fought in its vicinity, and it is not unlikely that he might have dwelt 
there. The high estimation in which he was held by the Bretons 
is natural enough. Arthur, indeed, was only one of the many 
kings of South Britain, but to the exiles of Brittany he was their 
own lost king. 

Whether, as Geoffrey himself asserted, Archdeacon Walter 
Calenius, journeying in Brittany, met there with an ancient manu- 
script, which proved to be a " History of the Britons," and gave 
it to Geoffrey, then engaged in the study of early British history, 
requesting him to translate it from Celtic into Latin ; or, whether 
Geoffrey, himself a native of Wales, musing over the many tales 
and traditions that still lingered among his countrymen, combined 
them in the pleasant solitude of his cloister into a fictitious narra- 
tive, which, amplified and enlarged, became at length that far- 
famed history, can perhaps never be fully ascertained. Still, 
however, apocryphal the wanderings of Brut and most of the earlier 
incidents of the "History of the Britons," may be, the later por- 
tions have received unquestionable confirmation from ancient 
Breton tradition ; while the researches of modern Cymric scholars 
have gone far to prove that a current of truth, slender often as it 
may be, certainly underlies the main stream of the narrative, 
which, likely enough, was greatly enlarged and modified by 
Geoffrey of Monmouth himself. 

The suddenly popularity of this work is in itself a very surprising 
fact. England, so lately reduced to bondage by the Normans, had 
no especial claim on the notice of Western Europe, but yet a 
professed chronicle of her king awakened an almost European 
attention. And the portion to which the scholar-mind and the 
popular mind of England alike most fondly turned, was no story 
of some hero celebrated in the ancient world, but one utterly un- 
known to Greek or Roman fame — the obscure king of an obscure 



128 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

people in the Southwest, the brave, but defeated leader of a hand- 
ful of men, who, after fighting in vain for their fatherland, passed 
over to Brittany, there to cherish, with longing memories of the 
land they had quitted, wild dreams of a triumphant return of 
their long-lost king. That the Bretons were well known to hold 
such a wild faith is proved by a proverb of the times, when " to 
expect King Arthur like the Bretons," was used to express the 
utmost extravagance of belief; but ere long the name that had 
long been used to point a proverb, became the very symbol of 
knightly virtue, the very watchword of chivalry. It was in 1147 
that Geoffrey's work appeared, and within ten years such was its 
wide popularity 7 , that the scholar who had not read the " History 
of the Britons" dared not show himself in literary society. It 
was in vain that William of Malmesbury denounced it throughout 
a long preface as a collection of silly fables ; or even that Gerald 
de Barry told the astounding story — the greater pity, because he 
has given us so many pleasant ones — how the Welsh demoniac , who 
was calm when the Gospel of St. John was laid upon his breast, 
was tormented by crowds of evil spirits when "lying Geoffrey's 
History" was substituted. All classes pressed eagerly to learn 
somewhat of the marvels contained in this widely read volume, 
and while the scholarship of England and France, and even of 
Germany, was busy in multiplying copies, or making abridg- 
ments, those to whom it was a sealed book sought for translations. 
And thus Gamair, one of the earliest of the Trouveres, almost 
on its first appearance, set about translating it into French. And 
Maistre Wace made an amplified version of it, which in 1 155 he 
presented to Eleanor of Aquitaine ; and ere long the Saxon priest 
of Ernley, Layamon, made it known through the medium of their 
birth-tongue to those who knew not the language of court or 
cloister. Many additions to the history of Geoffrey were made, 
no doubt, by Wace, the French translator, and also, no doubt, 
by Layamon. Traditions, well nigh forgotten until Geoffrey's 
History once more unlocked the stores of old British legend, 
were introduced and incorporated with it. Especially are .we 
struck with the additions made to the history respecting the char- 
acter of King Arthur. In Geoffrey we see him as a powerful king 
and a most valiant warrior ; but there are no traits to point him 
out as the "very parfaite gentil knighte," and very little inci- 
dent in his life. In Wace we find him more carefully drawn. He 
bestows two thousand lines on his favorite hero, and gives us a 



THE SCANDINAVIANS 129 

minute description of his arms, of his good sword, so well known 
afterwards as Excalibur — Wace, however, calls it Caliburn — and 
of his spear of which he tells us he heard many strange tales in 
Brittany. But while he minutely describes the fatal battle of 
Cumlan — about 537 — he acknowledges himself unable to account 
fully for Arthur's disappearance. This is his version, translated 
as closely as possible from the original : 

And Arthur, saith the history, 

In the heart was stricken mortally, 

And thence to Avalon was borne, 

That healed his wound might be : nor mourn. 

There still he wons ; the Bretons wait 

His coming, for their lays relate 

He liveth still, and still they look. 

I, Maistre Wace, who made this book, 

Will naught affirm save that I hold 

That sooth which Prophet Merlin told. 

He said that Arthur's end should be 

For age enwrapt in mystery. 

No such skeptical view was Layamon's. He first told, with no 
misgiving, the story of the enchanted barque, and the fairy who 
so tenderly bore Arthur away in tranced slumber. Here is his 
account as modernized by Mr. Morley : 

' ' I will fare to Avalon — to the fairest of all maidens, 

To Argante the queen — an elf most fair, — 

And she shall make my wounds all sound, 

Make me all whole, with healing draughts. 

And afterward w T ill I come unto my kingdom. 

Kven with the words there came wending 

From the sea a short boat, floating with the waves, 

And two women therein, wonderfully formed, 

And they took Arthur anon — and bare him quickly 

And laid him down softly — and forth they 'gan depart. 

Then was it done — what Merlin whilome said — 

That mickle care should come — of Arthur's forth-faring. 

The Bretons believe yet that he is alive, 

And dwelleth in Avalon — with the fairest of all elves, 

And the Bretons ever yet await — when Arthur shall return." 

§ 56. The Scandinavians. 
A most interesting relic is this metrical chronicle consisting of 
more than thirty-two thousand lines, the composition not of a 
courtly Trouvere, not of a learned churchman at the behest of some 
high church dignitary, perhaps of the king himself, but of a simple 
parish priest, dwelling near the Welsh marshes, who ''with the 
true fine spirit of a poet and scholar had an imagination kindled 
10 



130 KNGIylSH LITERATURE 

by Geoffrey of Monmouth. ' ' Very pleasant in its homely simplicity 
is the introduction to the ' ' Brut : ' ' how Eayamon the priest-prince, 
with eight of his brothers, fell by the Scald Byvynd; and who for 
his superior skill in poetry was called The Cross of Poets, and had 
fought in the battle which he celebrated. Olaf, a king of Norway, 
when his army was prepared for the onset, placed three Scalds 
about him and exclaimed aloud : ' ' You shall not only record in 
your verses what you have heard, but what you have seen.''' 
They each delivered an ode on the spot. These Northern chiefs 
appear to have frequently hazarded their lives with such amazing 
intrepidity, merely in expectation of meriting a panegyric from 
their poets, the judges and spectators of their gallant behavior. 
That Scalds were common in the Danish armies, when they 
invaded England, appears from a stratagem of Alfred, who 
availing himself of his skill in oral poetry and playing on the 
harp, entered the Danish camp, habited in that character, and 
procured a hospitable reception. This was in the year 878. 
Anlaff, a Danish king, used the same disguise for reconnoitering 
the camp of the Saxon monarch of England, Athelstan. Taking 
his station near Athelstan 's pavilion, he entertained the king and 
his chiefs with his verse and music and was dismissed with an 
honorable reward. As Anlaff' s dialect must have disovered him 
to have been a Dane, here is a proof, of which there are others, 
that the Saxons, even in the midst of mutual hostilities, treated 
the Danish Scalds with favor and respect. 

That the Islandic bards were common in England during the 
Danish invasions there are numerous proofs. Egill, a celebrated 
Islandic poet, having murdered the son and many of the friends 
of Eric Blodoxe, king of Denmark or Norway, then residing in 
Northumberland, which he had just conquered, procured a pardon 
by singing before the king, at the demand of his queen, Gunhilda, 
an extemporaneous ode. Egill, although of the enemy's party, 
was a singular favorite of King Athelstan. The latter once asked 
Egill how he escaped due punishment from Eric Blodoxe, the king 
of Northumberland and for the very capital and enormous crime 
which we have just mentioned. On which Egill related the whole 
of that transaction to the Saxon king, in a sublime ode still extant. 
On another occasion Athelstan presented Egill with two rings and 
two large cabinets filled with silver, promising him at the same 
time to grant him any gift or favor that he should choose to re- 
quest. Egill, struck with gratitude, immediately composed a 



THE SCANDINAVIANS 131 

panegyrical poem in the Norwegian language, then common to 
both nations, on the virtues of Athelstan, which the latter as 
generously requited with two marks of pure gold. 

There is likewise another argument that the Saxons had no 
small esteem for Scaldic poetry. It is highly reasonable to conjec- 
ture that the Danish King Canute, a potentate of most extensive 
jurisdiction, and not only king of England, but of Denmark, 
Sweden and Norway, was not without the customary retinue of the 
Northern courts, in which the Scalds held so distinguished and 
important a station. Human nature, in a savage state, aspires to 
some species of merit, and in every stage of society is alike suscepti- 
ble of flattery when addressed to the reigning passion . The sole 
object of these Northern princes was military glory. It is certain 
that Canute delighted in this mode of entertainment, which he 
patronized and liberally rewarded. It is related in the Knitlinga 
Saga, or Canute's History, that he commanded the Scald Loftunga 
to be put to death for daring to comprehend his achievements in too 
concise a poem. "Nemo," said he, "ante te, ausus est de me 
Breves Ca?itile?ias componere," a curious picture of the tyrant, 
the patron and the barbarian united ! But the bard extorted a 
speedy pardon, and with much address, by producing the next day 
before the king at dinner an ode of more than thirty strophes, for 
which Canute gave him fifty marks of purified silver. In the 
meantime the Danish language began to grow perfectly familiar 
in England. It was eagerly learned by the Saxon clergy and 
nobility from a principle of ingratiating themselves with Canute ; 
and there are many manuscripts now remaining by which it will 
appear that the Danish runes were much studied by the Anglo- 
Saxons under the reign of that monarch. Even the songs of the 
Irish bards are by some conceived to be also strongly marked with 
the traces of Scaldic imagination, and these traces are believed 
still to survive among a species of poetical historians, whom they 
call tale-bearers, supposed to be the descendants of the original 
Irish bards — nor is it improbable that the Welsh bards might have 
been acquainted with the Scandinavian Scalds. 

There are strong instances of conformity between the manners of 
the two nations, which, however, may be accounted for on general 
principles, arising from our comparative observations on rude life. 
Yet it is remarkable that mead, the Northern nectar, a favorite 
liquor of the Goths, who seem to have stamped it with the char- 
acter of a poetical drink, was no less celebrated among the Welsh. 



132 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

The songs of both nations abound with its praises, and it seems to 
have been alike the delight of the warrior and the bard. Taliessin, 
Lhuyd informs us, wrote a panegyrical ode on the inspiring bev- 
erage of the bee, or as he translates it, De Mulso seu Hydromeli, In 
Hoel Dha's Welsh Laws, translated by Wotton, we have — In 
omne convivio in quo mulsum bibitur. From which passages 
it seems to have been served up only at high festivals. By the 
same constitutions, the bards are represented as breaking forth in 
spontaneous songs and verses. But the exercise of the poetical 
talent was properly confined to a stated confession ; and with their 
poetry the Goths imported into Europe a species of poets or sing- 
ers, whom they called Scalds or Polishers of Language. This 
order of men, as we shall presently see, was held in the highest 
honor and veneration ; they received the most liberal rewards for 
their verses, attended the festivals of heroic chiefs, accompanied 
them in battle, and celebrated their victories. These Scandinavian 
bards appear to have been esteemed and entertained in other 
countries besides their own, and by that means to have communi- 
cated their fictions to various parts of Europe. 

The inhabitants of Sweden, Denmark and Norway — whether or 
no from their Asiatic origin, from their poverty which compelled 
some of them to seek their fortunes at foreign courts by the exer- 
cise of a popular art," from the success of their bards, the nature 
of their republican government, or their habits of unsettled life — 
were more given to verse than any other Gothic or Celtic tribe. 
But this is not all. They remained pagans, and retained their 
original manners much longer than any of their Gothic kindred. 
They were not completely converted to Christianity till the tenth 
century — three centuries after the Conversion of the Anglo-Saxons. 
Under the concurrence, however, of some of the causes just men- 
tioned, their Scaldic profession acquired greater degrees of strength 
and maturity ; and from an uninterrupted possession of the most 
romantic religious superstitions and the preservation of those 
rough manners, which are so favorable to the poetic spirit, they 
were enabled to produce, not only more genuine, but more numer- 
ous compositions. True religion would have checked the impet- 
uosity of their passions, suppressed their wild exertions of fancy 
and banished that striking train of imagery, which their poetry 
derived from a barbarous theology. This circumstance also sug- 
gests to our consideration those superior advantages and opportu- 
nities arising from the leisure and length of time, which they 



THK SCANDINAVIANS 133 

enjoyed above others, of circulating their poetry far and wide, of 
giving a general currency to their mode of fabling, of rendering 
their skill in versification more universally and familiarly known, 
and a more conspicuous and popular object of admiration or imi- 
tation to the neighboring countries. 

From no foreign source, before the Norman Conquest, did the 
Anglo-Saxons receive so great a share of poetical fiction and 
fable as from the Danes. As from the invasion of these Northern 
adventurers the manners and customs, not only of the Anglo- 
Saxons in England who came partly for a time under their power, 
but even of the Welsh and Irish, those people of a different race, 
for the Danes, like the Anglo-Saxons, being Teutonic or Gothic 
in their origin, were very much affected and infused and pervaded 
by something of their spirit. To know more of these it becomes 
necessary to consider the manners and customs of the Scandina- 
vians themselves, of whom the Danes, as also the Swedes and 
Norwegians were nations ; and to arrive at this more effectually 
and orderly, it is perhaps best for us to go back and trace their 
origin from the Goths in Asia ; thus showing their remote connec- 
tion with the Arabians, from whom it is supposed some of their 
fancies and legends were derived. 

A few years before the birth of Christ, soon after Mithridates 
had been overthrown by Pompey, a nation of Asiatic Goths, who 
possessed that region of Asia which is now called Georgia and is 
connected on the south with Persia, alarmed at the progressive 
encroachments of the Roman armies, retired in vast multitudes 
under conduct of their leader, Odin, or Woden, into the Northern 
parts of Europe, not subject to the Roman government; and set- 
tled in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and other districts of the 
Scandinavian territory. As they brought with them many useful 
arts, particularly the knowledge of letters, which Odin is said to 
have invented, they were hospitably received by the natives, and 
by degrees acquired a safe and peaceable establishment in the new 
country, which seems to have adopted their language, laws and 
religion. Odin is said to have been styled a god by the Scandi- 
navians ; an appellation which the superior address and specious 
abilities of the Asiatic chief easily extorted from a more savage 
and uncivilized people. 

A skill in poetry seems in some measure to have been a national 
science among the Scandinavians, and to have been familiar almost 
to every order and degree. Their kings and warriors partook of 
this epidemic enthusiasm and on frequent occasions. 



134 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

It is probable that the Danish invasions produced a considerable 
alteration in the manners of the Anglo-Saxons. Although their 
connections with England were transient and interrupted, and on 
the whole lasted scarcely two hundred years, yet many of the 
Danish customs began to prevail among the inhabitants, which 
seem to have given a new turn to their temper and genius. The 
Danish fashion of excessive drink, for instance, a vice almost 
natural to the Northern nations, became so general among the 
Anglo-Saxons that it was found necessary to restrain so pernicious 
and contagious a practice by a particular statute. Hence it seems 
likely that so popular an entertainment as their poetry gained 
ground ; especially, if we consider that in their expeditions against 
England they were attended by many Northern Scalds, who 
constantly made a part of their military retinue, and whose lan- 
guage was understood by the Saxons. The noble ode called in 
Northern chronicles the Elogium of Hacon, king of Norway, was 
composed. 

§ 57. Robin Hood. 

Robin Hood's mythical life need not deprive him of his natural 
one. Sloth, in I^angland's poem, couples him with Randle, Earl 
of Chester ; and no one doubts this nobleman's existence, because 
he had rhymes made about him. According to a good authority, 
he may have been the third Randle. And possibly enough, Hood 
was contemporary with that earl who ' ' nourished ' ' in the reign 
of Richard I, John and Henry III. Wynton in the fifteenth 
and Major of the nineteenth century, assign him to that period. 
It is impossible to believe, with Hunter, that he lived so late as 
Edward the Second's reign. This would leave no time for the 
growth of his myth ; and his myth was, as is evident from what 
we have already said, full grown, in the first half of the fourteenth 
century. 

But whether he lived or not, and whenever he lived, it is certain 
that many mythical elements are contained in his story. Both his 
name and his exploits remind us of the woodland spirit, Robin 
Goodfellow and his merry pranks. He is fond of disguising him- 
self, and devoted to fun and practical jokes. And the connection 
of the May games with him points with a fusion to some old 
memory, with some sun-god. In fact the outlaw would seem to 
have become a centre around which gathered and settled the older 
traditions of men and of spirits and of gods. Folk-lore, that was 
rapidly perishing, thus gave itself a new consistency and life. 
The name Robin — French for Rob, which is of course, a short 



ROBIN HOOD 135 

form for Robert — was used to serve both for ' ' the shrewd and 
knavish sprite," the German Knecht, Ruprecht, and for the bandit. 
See in the Prologue of Piers the Plowman and the note on Wartin's 
Histoiy of English Poets. How certain it is that the Robin Hood 
story attracted to it and appropriated other elements, is illustrated 
by its subsequent history : its history after the fourteenth century. 
Thus later on we find it connected with the Morris Dance, but the 
Morris Dance — the Dance of Death—was not known in England 
before the sixteenth century or late in the fifteenth. And the form 
of the story was greatly modified in the beginning of the seven- 
teenth century, to suit the ideas of the age. It was then that 
a peer was imported into it, and the yeoman of the older version 
was metamorphosed into the Karl of Huntingdon, for whom in 
the following century Sir Thomas Stukely discovered a satisfactory 
pedigree. At last, with the change of time, the myth ceased 
growing. Its rise and development and decay deserve a more 
thorough study than they have yet received. 

What perhaps is its greatest interest, as we first see it, is its 
expression of the popular mind about the close of the Middle 
Ages. Robin Hood is at that time the people's ideal, as Arthur 
is of the upper classes. He is the ideal yeoman, as Arthur 
is the ideal knight. He readjusts the distribution of property; 
he robs the rich and endows the poor. He is an earnest worship- 
per of the Virgin, but a bold and vigorous hater of monks and 
abbots. He is the greatest sportsman, the incomparable archer, 
the lover of the green-wood and of a free life ; brave, adventurous, 
jocular, open-handed, a protector of women. Observe his instruc- 
tions to Little John : 

Luke ye, do no housbonde harme 

That trylleth with his plough ; 
No more ye shall no good yeman 

That walketh by grene and shawe. . 

Ne no knight, ne no squyer, 

That wolde be a good felaure. 
These bysshoppes and thyse and archbyssophes 

Ye shall them bete and bynde : 
The hye sheryfe of Notyngham 

Him holde in your minde. 

And we are told that 

Robin loved our dere ladye, 

For doute of dedely synne 
Wolde he never do company harme 

That ony woman was ynne. 

—Prof. J. WeseEy HaeES. 



136 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

§ 58. Transition English. 

A few years after the beginning of the thirteenth century we 
have to note the appearance of an important and interesting work 
in England — Lay amort s B?'itt. Layamon, the son of Leovenath, 
called in the latter text of his poem, Laweman, the son of Leuca, 
was a priest who read the services of the Church at Brnley, now 
Areley, in Worcestershire. Living in the days — about 1200 — 
when Geoffrey of Monmouth's Chronicle and Wace's French 
metrical version of it were new books in high favor among the 
educated and the courtly, ' ' it came to him in mind and in his 
chieftest thought, that he would tell the famous story to his country- 
men in English verse." He made a long journey in search of 
copies of the books on which he was to form his poems ; and when 
he had come home again, as he says, " Layamon laid down those 
books and turned the leaves ; he beheld them lovingly : may the 
Lord be merciful to him ! ' ' Then blending literature with his 
parish duties, the good priest began his work. Priest in a rural 
district he was among those who spoke the language of the country, 
with the least mixture of Norman- French ; and he developed 
Wace's "Brut" into a completely English poem, with so many 
additions from his own fancy, or his own knowledge of West 
Country tradition, that while Wace's Brut is a poem of 15,300 
lines, in Layamon's Brut the number of lines is 32,250. Lay- 
amon's verse is the old Saxon unrhymed measure with alliteration, 
less regular in its structure than in Saxon times, and with an 
occasional slip into rhyme. Battles are described as in the ver- 
nacular poems. 

Here, as in Saxon poetry, there are few similes, and those which 
occur are simply derived from natural objects. There is the old 
depth of earnestness that rather gains than loses dignity by the 
simplicity of its expressions. From internal evidence it appears 
that the poem was completed about the year 1205. It comes 
down to us in the thirteenth ceutury manuscripts : one written in 
a generation later than the others ; and there are many variations 
of their texts. 

The Brut is strictly a monument of the age of transition. In 
the Brut, however, it must be carefully observed that, although 
the language is Anglo-Saxon, the poetical atmosphere, the intel- 
lectual horizon, and even the cast of diction, are Norman-French. 
The rich poetical vocabulary of the Anglo-Saxon poets has van- 



GOWER AND LANGLKY 137 

ished beyond recovery. Not one of the innumerable poetic com- 
positions relating to battle and victory, which are found in Beo- 
wulf, A?idreas, and others, occurs in the duller pages of the Brut. 
Words expressive of jurisdiction and government, of which the 
Anglo-Saxon, while the native race was dominant, had a great 
variety, are in the Brut, if used at all, borrowed to a large extent 
from the French. — H. Morlefs English Literature. 

§ 59. John Gower — 1320-1408. 

John Gower was a man of wealth, learning and refinement. 
The first two of his chief poems, the Speculum Meditantis and the 
Vox Cla??ia?itis , were composed in French and Latin, respectively. 
But the third, Confessio Amantis — 1385-1392 — written at the re- 
quest of Richard II, was in English. " Booksome new thing," 
said the King, while sailing with him on the Thames, "in the 
way you are used, into which I may often look." Though pos- 
sessed of little literary merit, Gower 's works were popular with 
the learned till the time of Shakespeare. His diction is more 
refined and accurate than that of Chaucer, and copiously tinctured 
with French. 

§ 60. William Langley — 1332-1400. 

William Langley was a native of Cleobury Mortimer in Shrop- 
shire. He is supposed to have been educated on Malvern Hills, 
Worcestershire, where he composed the first version of his great 
poem, entitled "The Vision of William concerning Piers the 
Plowman, ' ' shortly after the Great Plague which ravaged England 
in 1361-1362. About the year 1377 he was living in London, 
where he wrote the second edition of his poem, extending to three 
times of its former length. Subsequently he returned to the West 
of England, and again re- wrote his poem, with various additions 
and alterations, between 1380 and 1390. 

Piers the Plowman is an allegorical poem, or series of poems, in 
which the author satirizes the vices and abuses of the age, the 
degeneracy of the prelates and priests, political corruption, the 
avarice and rapacity of the nobility, and the oppression of the 
poor by the rich. Piers is intended to represent the model Chris- 
tian, and is at times identified with Christ. 

A crowd of allegorical personages, representing different types 
of human character after having been brought to repentance by 
the preaching of Reason, earnestly desire to find out the way to 



138 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

the abode of Truth. Their authorized guides do not know the 
road ; and it is Piers the Plowman, from whom at last they obtain 
the guidance which they require. The metre is alliterative, like 
that of the old Saxon poets . The writer seems to address himself 
to a class socially inferior to that which Chaucer and Gower sought 
to please — a class, therefore, almost purely Saxon, and likely to 
receive with pleasure a work composed in the old rhythm dear to 
their forefathers. 

The great social and religious movement of the fourteenth cen- 
tury revived the poetical genius of England, which had been for 
the most part dormant since the Norman Conquest, and led to the 
first expansion of English literature. The earliest awakening was 
given in the Vision of the Plowman : it was the first original poem 
of any length whose argument is not founded directly on the 
Scriptures. It is an allegorical poem of almost fifteen thousand 
verses, and appeared in its earliest form in 1362. Satirizing the 
social and religious abuses of the time, it acquired great popularity 
among the lower classes of society and among those requiring 
church reform. The rude followers of Wat Tyler read it eagerly, 
and its Protestant principles exerted almost as great an influence 
as the preaching of WicklifTe. Composed in a rude English 
dialect, and in the Saxon alliterative versification, the Vision 
affords a specimen of English poetry just as it passed into the 
hands of Chaucer and Gower. In the closing years of the four- 
teenth century, two poems in imitation of the Vision, entitled the 
"Crede of Piers the Plowman," and the "Complaynte of Piers 
the Plowman," appeared by an unknown author. 

William Langley, or Langland, was probably born at Cleobury, 
in South Shropshire. His father and friends put him to school, 
made a clerk or scholar of him, and taught him what Holy Writ 
meant. In 1362, at the age of about thirty, he began to work upon 
the poem, which was to occupy him the greater part of his life. 
The real subject of his poem is the religious and social condition 
of the poorer classes of England during the reign of Edward III 
and Richard II. Incidentally he describes himself as a tall man, 
going by the nickname of Long Will, one loath to reverence lords 
and ladies, or persons dressed in fur or wearing ornaments; and 
not deigning to say, " God save you" to the sergeants whom he 
met. It requires no great sketch of the imagination to picture to' 
ourselves the tall, gaunt figure of Long Will, in his long black 
robes and with shaven crown, striding along Cornhill, saluting no 



JOHN WICKXIFFE 139 

man by the way, and minutely observant of the gay dresses to 
which he paid no outward' reverence. 

His poem is allegorical, and, like many of Chaucer's, describes 
a vision in a dream. It extends to about fourteen thousand short 
lines of two or four accents. It is written throughout with a 
didactic purpose, which often appears in the form of a special 
satire on particular classes and professions. Abuses in religion, 
and the malpractices of ecclesiastics form, as might be expected, 
the chief mark for this satire. A crowd of allegorical personages, 
representing different types of human character, after being- 
brought to repentance by the preaching of Reason , earnestly desire 
to find out the way to the abode of Truth. Their authorized 
spiritual guides do not know the road, and it is Piers the Plow- 
man, from whom they at last obtained the guidance. The metre 
is alliterative like that of the old Saxon poets. The writer seems 
to address himself to a class socially inferior to that which Chaucer 
and Gower sought to please — a class, therefore, almost purely 
Saxon, and likely to receive with pleasure a work composed in 
the old rhythm dear to their forefathers. In spirit it is Puritanical 
and Protestant two centuries before the era of Protestantism. There 
is no attack on the theology of Rome. It is a calm allegorical 
exposition of the corruptions of the State, Church and Social Life. 
The design is not to rouse the people to cruelty and bloodshed, 
but to point out the true causes of the evils. Capital and labor 
were then in conflict. It was a time of shame and suffering such 
as England had never seen, and the troubles of the poor were 
aggravated by the Black Death. "As indicating the true temper 
and feelings of the English mind in the fourteenth century," 
Mr. Skeats, in his Preface, remarks ' 'it is worth volumes of history . ' ' 

§61. John Wickliffe — 1324.-IJ84. . 
Before the introduction of printing in England by Caxton, in 
1474, the scholastic philosophy reigned undisturbed at the Univer- 
sities. John Wickliffe, so far as his methods of argument and 
reliance on argument was concerned, was as much a schoolman as 
the Friars who contended with him. The time had not come when 
a churchman would be found, like Colet, to deny the scholastic 
methods and rely on literature rather than on logic. His first at- 
tacks on the established order were directed not against the holding 
of temporal "lordship" or authority by ecclesiastical persons, nor 
against the claims asserted by the Pope to receive ' ' Peter's pence, ' ' 



140 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

or an equivalent from the Knglish nation. All his controversial 
writings were set forth in Latin ; but after the introduction of print- 
ing, Wickliffe resolved to carry the conflict into a more spacious 
arena, to appeal to popular sympathy, by writing in the language 
of the people. He preached and circulated many Knglish sermons ; 
he organized his ' ' pore priestes " as a body of itinerant preachers ; 
assisted by his fellows, he put into circulation an incredible num- 
ber of English tracts directed against abuses in discipline, and in 
what he deemed errors in doctrine. Lastly, he caused to be made 
a complete translation of the Vulgate Bible, and he himself, in all 
probability, took a considerable share in the work. His efforts, 
seconded by those of his principal adherents, such as Herford, 
Ressington, Purvey and others gave rise to the sect of Lollards, 
which must have rapidly grown into importance, since it received 
marked notice in the poetry — written probably between 1 380-1 390 
— of both Chaucer and Gower. The famous Act, " De heretico 
comburendo" of 1401, and the rigid inquisitorial institutes of 
Archbishop Arundel and carried on by Chichely, drove Lollardism 
beneath the surface of society and from the pages of literature. 
Yet, though suppressed, the spirit of discontent survived. Many 
Lollards were burnt as late as in the first year of Henry VIII ; 
and the rain of pamphlets against the church and clergy, which 
burst forth as soon as the king was ascertained to be hostile to 
them, was a sufficient indication of the pent-up hatred which filled 
the breasts of thousands. 

' ' If Chaucer is the father of our later English poetry, ' ' remarks 
John Richard Green, "Wickliffe is the father of our later English 
prose. The rough, clear, homely English of his tracts, the speech 
of the ploughman and the trader of the day, though colored with 
the picturesque phraseology of the Bible, is in its literary use as 
distinctly a creation of his own as the style in which he embodied 
his thoughts, the terse vehement sentences, the stinging sarcasm, 
the hard antitheses which roused the dullest mind like a whip." 

In the course of time he broached what were considered singular 
opinions on several abstruse points in metaphysics, which led to 
"determinations," or treatises, being published against him by 
John Kiningham, a Carmelite, and JohnTyssington, a Franciscan. 
Later on he aroused a- theological storm — about 1380 — by reviving 
something like the condemned heresy of Berengarius, on the mode 
of the presence of Christ in the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper. 
Replies were written by Wynterton, Wells, Berton and others. 



THE SHORT PASTORAL 141 

A Synod met in London and condemmed Wickliffe's doctrine: he 
died soon after at Lutherworth . 

§ 62. The Short Pastoral, the Song, and the Ballad. 

In any published collection of ancient poetry, down even to the 
time of that of "Percy's Reliques," between short pastorals, 
songs, and ballads, no proper discrimination is made, but they are 
all massed under the one general heading of Ballads. This con- 
fusion of terms especially existed in the earliest times of all coun- 
tries, ere such compositions had been collected at all, or committed 
to writing or printing, but were still forming a part of folk-lore, 
being transmitted from one generation to another through oral 
tradition. Then, at these merry-makings, when the illiterate people 
of the country sang any of these several kinds of verses, they were 
always in the habit of accompanying them at first with a sort of 
oscillating or vibratory movement, more fully to express with the 
harmony their sympathetic feelings : whence, in early times, these 
exercises came to be called Ballads, a term derived from an old 
Middle-Latin word, Ballare, which in the Italian of those days 
meant ' ' to incline to this side and to that ; ' ' and as dancing at such 
recitals was considered to be the better part of the enjoyment, the 
term ballad, a synonym for dancing, was made to imply and denote 
the whole accomplishment. 

In these modern days of more correct and definite speaking and 
writing, however, we think these several kinds of rustic poems 
should no longer be confounded, or assorted promiscuously to- 
gether, but that each should be assigned to its proper province 
and restricted to its own legitimate meaning. 

A short pastoral properly belongs to the vocation of shepherds, 
and should be confined solely to their use, or to poets assuming for 
the nonce the character of these. Indeed, the best pastorals, it must 
be said, have always been composed, not by shepherds at all but 
by highly educated persons of the cities, who, although well ac- 
quainted with the shepherds' modes of living, having perhaps 
mingled occasionally in the society of such ; or, assuming them- 
selves to be shepherds for the nonce, have addressed their lady- 
loves, residing in the cities, in pastoral strains, under classic 
names, imagining them the while to be rural nymphs or dwellers 
in some feigned Arcadia. 

Between the song and the ballad, again, as now understood, 
there is a marked distinction. A song is a composition which 



142 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

contains little or no narrative, tells no facts, or gives only allu- 
sively the thinnest possible framework of facts, with a view to 
convey some one prevailing sentiment — one sentiment, one emo- 
tion, simple, passionate, unalloyed with intellectualizing or analy- 
sis. It is of feeling all compact; the words are translucent with 
the light of one prevailing emotion, the essence of the true song. 
Mr. Carlyle well describes the true song when he says " the story, 
the feeling, is not detailed, but is suggested : not said, nor spouted 
in rhetorical completeness or coherence, but sung in fitful gushes, 
in glowing hints, in fantastic breaks, in warblings, not of the 
voice only, but of the whole mind." 

A ballad, on the other hand, is a poem which narrates an event 
in a simple style, noticing the several incidents of it successively 
as they occurred, not indulging in sentiment or reflection, but 
conveying whatever sentiment is in it indirectly : in the way the 
facts are told, rather than by any direct expression. For its effect 
upon the hearers it depends, when recited, rather on its simple, 
energetic mode of expression, its tone of thought, or marked 
rhythm, than on any instrumental accompaniment; on the time in 
which it is set, or the skill of the singer, which is best displayed 
when he gives to every word its full syllabic articulation ; and on 
the expression and force which its meaning and weight require, 
without any of those trills, bravuras and embroideries which be- 
long to the Italian schools that charm the ear with sound, while 
entirely concealing from it the sense. 

§ 63. Old English Ballads. 
Among the earliest and most popular of English ballads are 
those relating to Robin Hood. This noted half-niythical outlaw 
was the impersonation of popular rights as they were understood 
by Englishmen of the lower orders in the days of the Plantagenets . 
Hence the memory of him and his reputed deeds was preserved 
in the songs of the people. "It is he" says an old historian, 
' ' whom the common people love so dearly to celebrate in games 
and comedies, and whose history, sung by fiddlers, interests them 
more than any other." Even so late as the reign of Edward VI, 
" Robyn Hoode's Daye" was very generally observed in the 
country parishes as a day of feasting and amusement. The tra- 
dition, which preserves his name and deeds, relates that he lived 
in the reign of Henry II, and that, being outlawed for debt, he 
dwelt in the forest, subsisting on the king's game and on such 



METRICAL ROMANCES 143 

plunder as lie could take from the nobility who came in his way. 
He finally had command of a company of a hundred archers, 
equal in strength and valor to any four hundred men who might 
be brought against them. 

Chief among the ballads of the border-land, which have their 
English as well as Scottish versions, is that of Chevy Chase, of 
which Sir Philip Sidney wrote : ' ' Certainly I must confess mine 
own barbarousness. I never heard the old song of Percy ajid 
Douglas that I found not my heart move more than with a 
trumpet; and yet it was sung by some blind crowder with no 
rougher voice than rude style." This ballad was probably com- 
posed as early as the time of Henry VI, if not earlier, certainly in a 
more easily satisfied age than ours. But in its sympathy with 
man, with human action, or human feelings, its range is very great, 
and its handling infinitely varied. The popular opinion of cen- 
turies has fixed upon the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales as a 
masterpiece, because it is there that this dramatic power of a 
realistic gift, which can grasp at will almost any phase of character 
or incident, noble or trivial, passionate or grotesque, finds its fullest 
scope. Other fourteenth century writers can tell a story, though 
none can be as tragic, pathetic, or amusing as Chaucer; but none 
else of that day can bring the actual world of men and women 
before us with the movement of a Florentine procession-picture, 
or with a color and truth of detail that anticipate the great Dutch 
masters of painting. To pass from the framework of other me- 
diaeval scenes, even from the villa and gardens of the Decameron to 
Chaucer's group of Pilgrims, is to pass from convention to reality. 
To reality, for, as Dry den says in that Preface, which shows how 
high he stood- above the critical level of his age: "in the Prologue 
we have our forefathers and grandames all before us, as they were 
in Chaucer's days: their general characters are still remaining in 
mankind, and in England, though they are called by other names 
than those of Monks and Friars, and Canons, Lady Abbesses and 
Nuns; for mankind is ever the same, and nothing lost out of 
nature, though everything altered." 

§64. Metrical Roma?ices. 

The metrical romances, once so popular in France and England, 

many of them composed and sung by the Norman Trouveres, 

were derived, as we have seen, from two sources of legends : first, 

from those of purely French origin, which were concentrated at 



144 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

last into the cycle of those concerning Charlemague and his 
paladins in their early crusades against the Moslems of Spain; 
and secondly, from those of Britanny and of British origin, which, 
formed into romances, were concentrated at last in the cycle con- 
cerning King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. 
Besides these, however, there were others, as those concerning 
King Horn, Havelock the Dane, Guy of Warwick and others, which 
were received into England, not through France or Britanny, but 
immediately from Denmark, and had often relation to old wars 
between the Christian Saxons and heathen Danes, taken up after- 
wards and celebrated in England after the Crusades, when the 
charms of Chivalry w T ere assumed and thrown over the old legends 
now turned into romances. 

The metrical romance began in England, and in English verse, 
as early as the year 1200, about the time of Eayamon's Brut. It 
nourished to some extent during the thirteenth century, but the 
time of its greatest ascendancy was in the fourteenth, declining, 
however, somewhere towards its close ; after which it began to 
wane and finally gave way to the prose romances, and then dis- 
appeared altogether for more than three hundred years. Even in 
Chaucer's day it was falling out of favor, and he burlesques it in 
his tale of Sir Thopas in the Canterbury Tales, using its own 
rhyme and measure as follows : 

Eisteth, lordes, in good intent, 
And I wol telle verrayment 

Of mirthe and of solas ; 
All of a Knyght was fair and gent 
In bataille and in tourneyment, 

His name was Sir Thopas. 

§ 65. Geoffrey Chaucer — 1328-14.00. Allegorical Poetry. 

Chaucer's " Romaunt de la Rose," whether original or trans- 
lated by him, is the first conspicuous of the mediaeval allegory. 
Allegory is a vessel so elastic that anything may be poured into 
it ; and in the Middle Ages the first sense of poetical form and 
poetical unity, in which the great writers of Greece and Rome are 
supreme, had little existence. Hence the Romance of the Rose is 
a strange, motley structure: in part, a psychological study of 
human virtue and vice ; in part, a kind of encyclopaedia or treas- 
ury of the knowledge of the day ; and, in part, a coarse and mate- 
rialistic story of love. Thus it addresses readers of all tastes and 



GEOFFREY CHAUCER — ALXEGORICAL POETRY 145 

classes ; and in spite of the contempt with which Petrarch regarded 
it, not only enjoyed a long popularity in Europe, but was the too 
fruitful parent of that allegorical style which for so many centuries 
alternately delights and wearies us in European literature. But 
the production and wide diffusion of a poem, such as this, points 
to a decline in the sense of chivalry ; it shows that the romances 
proper were beginning to be out-worn ; that readers were satiated 
with stories of action and adventure ; and that analyses of motive 
and character were asserting their interests. It has, in short, 
already a subjective character. 

In this respect, however, allegory was wholly alien from 
Chaucer's realistic, unspeculative genius ; and although he returns 
to the style in his ' ' House of Fame ' ' and ' ' Assembly of Foules, ' ' 
yet in each case, unable to conquer the inherent feebleness of his 
style, he gives life and individuality to his characters, and hence 
his allegories remain, at any rate, readable. Chaucer's free trans- 
lation of the Romance of the Rose, seems to mark the height of 
French influence over him ; it points to the flexibility of his mind, 
to his readiness to accept the new ways of literature; but his 
model could hardly lift him into a new and fruitful path ; and, like 
other French Fabliaux, which he used throughout his career, it 
supplied him rather with material than with method. For, with the 
motive power which enabled him to form the art of English 
poetry, we must look to that Italian impulse, which made him the 
connecting link between England and the Renaissance in the 
earlier and most fruitful phase of that movement in Italy. This 
we may name Chaucer's second period. This new impulse which 
he received, this electric shock, we may conjecture, was due to 
the foreign missions, which, between 1370 and 1373, carried 
Chaucer to Genoa and Florence on commercial or political busi- 
ness. Whether in these journeys he met with Petrarch or Boc- 
caccio is absolutely uncertain ; and by 1378, when a third embassy 
led him into Lombardy, both were no longer living. What we 
can clearly see is that it was the greatest writers whom Italy 
had yet produced — Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio — by whom the 
Englishman was moved and penetrated. It is upon this point 
upon which we wish to insist. He went at once to the master 
sources — a sure sign that he had that sanity in judgment, that 
largeness of aim, without which nothing great can be accomplished 
in art. "No important poem written by him after his visits to 
Italy," as Mr. Ward remarks, "is without traces of the vivifying 



146 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

and regulative effect which that magna pare?is of art produced 
upon him." 

' ' Chaucer, ' ' says Hallam, ' ' seems to me have wanted grandeur, 
where he is original both in conception and language. But in 
vivacity of imagination and care of expression, he is above all 
poets of the Middle Time, and comparable perhaps to the greatest 
of those who have followed it. It is chiefly as a comic poet and 
a minute observer of manners that he excels. In serious and 
moral poetry he is frequently languid and diffuse; but he springs, 
like Antaeus from the earth, when his subject changes into coarse 
satire or merry narrative." He is among our greatest poets, but 
no one of them keeps so steadily to the mere average level — one 
might hint the bourgeois level of his time — as Chaucer : he is oif 
his age, not above it. 

§ 66. Chaucer's Court of Love. 

Chaucer's first original work was probably The Court of Love, 
a poem, which so clearly derives its allegorical form from the 
Roman de la Rose, that it might most naturally have come into 
his mind while he was at work on his translation of that poem. 
But, through forms that he was to outgrow, he already spoke 
like himself. In the Court of I^ove he struck the key-note 
of his future harmonies. The most characteristic feature of his 
poetry at once appears in it. The author is represented as " Philo- 
genet of Cambridge, clerk," ashamed to think that he is eighteen 
years old and has not yet paid service at the Court of L,ove. He 
journeyed, and what does he find? Venus, of course, is the god- 
dess worshipped. But under her the mythical Admetus and 
Alcestis, through whom marriage was idealized, are King and 
Queen of I^ove, and they live in a castle painted without and 
within with daisies. This reading of love, and the use of the 
daisy as its type, is Chaucer's own, repeated sometimes in form 
and spirit, pervading all the work of his life. For Chaucer alone 
in his time felt the whole beauty of womanhood, and felt it 
most, in its most perfect type, in wifedom, with the modest 
graces of the daisy, with its soothing virtues, and its power of 
healing inward wounds. Physicians in his day ascribed such 
power to the plant which, by Heaven's special blessing, was 
made common to all — to the daisy as the outward emblem also of 
the true and pure wife, in its heart of gold and its white crown of 
innocence. That is what Chaucer meant when he told in later 



THE LEGEND OF GOOD WOMEN 147 

writings 01 his reverence for the daisy and identified it with Alcestis. 
Why Alcestis ? The old fable said that Admetus was the son of 
Pheres, founder of Pherse, and one of those who took part in the 
Calydonian boar hunt and the Argonautic expedition. He sought 
marriage with Alcestis, daughter of Pelias, and was accepted by 
her father on condition that he came to claim her in a chariot 
drawn by lions and bears. This he did by help of Apollo. But 
because he forgot to sacrifice to Diana, he found in his bridal 
chamber snakes rolled in a lump. Apollo appeased the goddess, 
and also obtained of the Fates deliverance from death for his 
friend Admetus, if, when the last hour came, his father or mother 
or wife would die for him . This Alcestis did ; but she was brought 
back from the lower world by Hercules . In this fable the lions and 
the bears, which were to be obedient to the rein before the bride was 
claimed, meant passions to be tamed: and the next incident was 
of like significance : the story being to its close an ideal of wifely 
devotion, throughout a mythical upholding of true marriage. In 
his Court of Love, Chaucer worked upon the lines of the French 
poets, introduced even a code distinctly founded on that of the 
Courts of Love, which were in his time still popular in France ; 
but it was not in him to adopt the mode of love of those courts. 
Like the English he had what we might now call his own sense of 
the domestic side of their own courtly theme, not represented even 
hy the English literature of his day ; and at once he became alone 
in his own time, and more distinctly than any other who followed 
him, the reverencer of the daisy, as he understood his flower — the 
poet of a true and perfect womanhood. 

§ 67. The Legend of Good Women. 

Chaucer, in "Troilus and Creseide," not content with all that 
he had done to give womanly delicacy to the character of Creseide 
in the earlier part of the poem, and to draw the noblest moral from 
her fall, felt even yet that the beauty of pure womanhood was 
clouded by her story. He set to work, therefore, upon the Legend 
of Good Women, with the avowed purpose of satisfying by his own 
sense of what is good and just. His stories of Good Women were 
probably written in various years, and represent the steadiness with 
which he paid through life to what he called reverence to the daisy. 
In the Prologue to this poem, written in or after 1382, he says ' ' that 
it was his delight to read in books, and that he was not easily drawn 
from his studies except in May when the flowers began to spring ; 



148 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

and then of all the flowers it was the daisy he loved." Chaucer 
alone, among those who wrote ditties to the Marguerite or Daisy, 
sang of the flower as an emblem of womanly truth and purity, of 
a gentle and devoted wife, with heart of gold and a white crown 
of innocence. On a bright May morning, feigning that he slept 
on fresh turfs, near the daisy, he saw in a dream the god of love 
leading a queen, Alcestis, like the daisy clad in royal 

habit green. 

A fret of gold she hadde next her hair, 
And upon that a white croune she bare, 
With fiourons small. 

After Alcestis came "the ladies good nineteen,'''' who were said, 
in Chaucer's Court of Love, to form her retinue. These all, when 
they saw the daisy, knelt, and sang, with one voice, hail and honor 
to the flower, that bare the praise of them all in its white emblem 
crown. But then the god of Love saw where the poet lay, too 
near to the god's own flower. He had translated the Romaunt 
of the Rose ; and he had sung of the faithless Creseide. Alcestis 
pleaded for him that he might have been falsely accused. He had 
served as he could, and he here gives a list of Chaucer's earliest 
writings, all of which are complimentary to the sex, and of a 
devoted wifely character. Alcestis obtained grace for the poet on 
condition that year by year as he lived, he should spend time in 
making a glorious legend 

Of goode women, maidenes and wives 
That weren true in loving all their lives. 

This Prologue could not have been written before 1382, when 
Richard II married Anne of Bohemia, to whom it was to be given 
on behalf of Alcestis. 

§ 68. Chaucer 's Love of Nature. 

Chaucer was the first who made the love of nature a distinct 
element in our poetry. He was the first who, in spending the 
whole day gazing alone on the daisy, set going that lonely delight 
in natural scenery, which is so special a mark in later English 
poets. The month of May, like the daisy, is the ever-recurring 
theme of his poetic admiration. It constitutes the time of action 
of most of his poems. The pilgrimage to Canterbury is placed in 
April, but the poet adds that it is the "messenger to Ma}^." Also 
the third of May seems to have been the favored date. It is on 
the third night of May that Palamon breaks out of prison and 






chaucer's love of nature 149 

encounters Arcite in the forest ; it is then the poet hears the debate 
of the Cuckoo and the Nightingale. In Troilus and Creseide, 
Pandoras visits Creseide on this day. In the legend of Goode 
Women, Chaucer thus sings: 



-There is game none, 



That fro my bookes maketh me to gone ; 
But it be seldome on the holie daie, 
Save certainly, whan that the month of May 
Is comen, and that I heare the foules sing 
And that the floures ginnen for to spring : 
Farewell, my bookes and my devotion. 

' ' What he here calls May, ' ' remarks Mr. Ward, ' ' with its birds 
and flowers, really means nature as a whole, not external nature 
only, but the world with its rich variety of sights and sounds and 
situations, and especially its most varied product, Man. As to 
his feeling for external nature, indeed, it might be called limited: 
it is only to the birds and the flowers, the ' showres swote, ' and the 
other genial gifts of Spring, that it seems to extend. Not only is 
there no trace in him of that 'religion of nature,' which is so 
powerful a factor in modern poetry, but there is nothing in the 
least that resembles those elaborate backgrounds in which the age 
of Spenser takes such delight. Nay, in the poet to whom we owe 
the immortal group of Pilgrims, there is little even of that minute 
local observation of places and their features, that memory for 
the grave -covered plains of Aries or the shattered banks of the 
Adige, which makes a part of Dante's genius, and gives such 
vividness to the phantom landscapes of his poem. While the 
Inferno has been mapped out for centuries, it is only to-day, after 
long discussion, that our scholars are able to make a map of the 
pilgrimage to Canterbury." 

The mediaeval poets generally had a horror for wild nature. 
They loved to describe only cultivated scenes. We cannot con- 
ceive of Chaucer being placed on the Alps or the Appenines, or 
near the ocean, like Byron, to embody his weird impressions. 
In his descriptions of nature he never soared into the sub- 
lime. He confines himself to scenes around the court, the castle 
•or his home. As for the world of man and human character, it is 
here admitted that Chaucer's triumphs have been greatest. In 
this respect his fame is so well established that there is little need 
to dwell on qualities with which he makes his first and deepest 
impression. But in his treatment of external nature there are 



150 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

limits beyond which Chaucer cannot go — the limits of his time, of 
a more certain and of a more satisfactory response to his poems. 

It is a pleasure to note, as Dean Plumptre observes in his very 
interesting and complete translation of Dante's poems — 1887-1888 
— that ' ' the earliest and fullest appreciative welcome given to the 
great poets of Italy came from the first, in order of time, from the 
great poets of England ; that an English gentleman, filling this or 
that office in the court of Edward the Third, should have known 
the three great names in Italian literature of the time, shows that 
there was more real fraternization between the men of letters of 
the two countries than has been common since" — a fact which 
the Dean justly traces to the cosmopolitan character, as we say, 
of mediaeval University life, when there was as yet no overt re- 
ligious schism : when scholars naturally visited, in turn, such 
centres of study as Paris, Bologna and Oxford. 

Chaucer has no scholarship in the strict sense, no historical 
insight into history. In his ' ' Troylus, ' ' fabulists, who wrote long 
after the Christian era, are all quoted side by side as authorities 
together : Troy with him has all the air of a French or English 
Gothic city; the warriors are knights in mediaeval armor. 
Creseide talks of reading the lives of Holy Saints, whilst rejoic- 
ing that she is not a nun herself: Amphorax — meant for Amphi- 
arius — is Bishop of Thebes. In the mythology of the " House of 
Fame," written after his Italian journey, Cytherus seems to stand 
for Mount Cithaeron ; Marsyas appears to be in the feminine form 
of Marcian ; Orion the Giant is mistaken for Arion, the Miscreant. 
It is, however, in the Troylus and Creseide, written probably 
between 1378 and 1382, that the Italian influence over Chaucer 
seems to culminate. 



To recapitulate a little . In Northern France, during the me- 
diaeval times there were cultivated three kinds of poems : first* 
the Fabliaux, which had no further object in view than to amuse 
or entertain the people in general, were composed of tales domestic 
or derived from abroad, and were of the highest quality ; second,, 
the allegorical poems, whose design was to convey moral or philo- 
losophical instruction by means of personifying abstract ideas, or 
presenting them under appropriate images ; third, the romances of 
chivalry, which were invented solely by the Normans and received 
into England in the twelfth century, during the reign of Henry 



REVIVAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 151 

the Second, the first of the Angevin kings. The Arthurian 
romances, which held the highest place among these, reflected 
at first in bright, picturesque forms, chiefly the animal life of the 
time. But Walter Map, an Archdeacon, and a chaplain to Henry 
II, put a soul into their flesh. From that day to this King Arthur, 
as the mythical romance hero of England, has been associated 
through English literature with the deep religious feeling of the 
country. 

§ 69. Revival of English Literature. 

In the beginning of the thirteenth century, in the reign of King 
John, there was a revival in England of a literature in the lan- 
guage of the land. Hitherto the tales and romances had all been 
written in French or Latin. Layamon, who read the services of the 
Church near Ernley, turned Geoffrey of Monmouth's Chronicle, 
with additions to its legends of King Arthur, into a long English 
poem. The "Ormulum," named after Brother Orm, its writer, 
endeavored to give to the people, in pleasant rhythmical form, the 
series of Gospels for the year, with a short homily upon each, for 
their instruction in religion. "The Land of Cockaygne " — 
Kitchen Land — was a satire on the corruption of religious orders. 
It painted a monk's paradise of fleshly delights, which was to be 
reached by wading for seven years in filth of swine. 

Those evils which gave rise to such a satire, and the effect they 
had upon the people, caused Francis of Assisi and the Spaniard 
Dominic to found the orders of the Franciscans and Dominicans, 
for strenuous labor to arrest decay within the Church in 1221. 
The Franciscans were to go poor among the poor as brothers, 
helping them to purify life. The Dominicans were banded to 
maintain the purity of doctrine in the Church. Exclusion of 
books forced the Franciscans to look with their own eyes upon 
nature, and rescued them from bondage to convential opinion. 
In the year 1224 Robert Grosseteste, a learned Suffolk man, who 
afterwards, as Bishop of Lincoln, led the opposition to the Pope's 
misuse of church patronage in England, became the first provin- 
cal of the Franciscans at Oxford. Roger Bacon, born in Somer- 
setshire in 1 2 14, with natural impulses that caused him to spend 
his patrimony in pursuit of knowledge, by the aid of books and 
observation and experiment, became a Franciscan friar and, with- 
drawn from the use of books, acquired a scientific knowledge far 
beyond that of his age. The results of his life's study were poured 



152 ENGIJSH LITERATURE 

out at the bidding of the Pope within eighteen months of the 
years 1268 or 1269. Bacon produced within a 3-ear and a half 
his Opus Majus, which now forms a large closely printed folio ; 
his Opus Minus, which was sent after the Opus Majus to Pope 
Clement, to recapitulate its arguments and strengthen some of its 
parts ; and his Opus Tertium, which followed as a summary and 
introduction to the whole, enriched with further novelty and pre- 
faced with a detail of the difficulties against which its author had 
contended. These books, produced by Roger Bacon, at the close 
of the reign of Henry III, and when he was himself about fifty- 
four years old, rejected nearly all that was profitless, and fastened 
upon all that in which there was life and power of growth in the 
knowledge of his time. They set out with the principle upon 
which Bacon, the Friar, first laid the foundation of the philosophy 
of Bacon, the Chancellor, of later times. Roger advocated the 
free and honest questioning of nature ; and, where books were 
requisite authorities, warned men against the errors that arose 
from reading them in bad translations. He would have had all 
true students endeavor to read the original text of the Bible and 
of Aristotle. He dwelt upon the importance of a study of mathe- 
matics, adding a particular consideration of optics, and ending 
with the study of nature by experiments, which, he said, is at the 
root of all other sciences and a basis of religion. Roger Bacon 
lived in the reign of Edward I, and died probably in the year 1292. 

§ 70. Celtic Element in English Literature. 

In Mr. Matthew Arnold's treatise on "Celtic literature " we 
have the earliest expression of his sympathy with that element in 
literature, with that magical, sweet, and melancholy mood, which 
perhaps the modern world owes to that ancient race which has 
lost its lands, and almost its language, but never lost its rare 
incommunicable gift of poetry . He sufficiently indicates the cul- 
ture of what might be called the Celtic mood. It has a strange 
melancholy brightness, and a beauty like that of a golden autumnal 
day among the hills, and lochs, and birch-woods of Western Scot- 
land. And the Celtic mood has a singular nearness to nature. 
Any one can feel its charm who has listened to the pleading 
accents of a Gaelic song. That music is the music of a natural 
people. 

' ' To all outward seeming, ' ' to quote from John Richard Green's 
History of the English people, "Wales had become utterly bar- 



CELTIC ELEMENT IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 153 

barous, stripped of every vestige of the older Roman civilization 
by ages of bitter warfare, of civil strife, of estrangement from the 
general culture of Christendom ; and the unconquered Britons had 
sunk into a mass of savage herdsmen, clad in skins and fed by the 
milk of the cattle they tended. Faithless, greedy, and revengeful, 
retaining no higher political organization than that of the clan, 
their strength was broken by ruthless feuds, and they were united 
only in battle against the stranger. But in the heart of the wild 
people there still lingered a spark of the poetic fire, which had 
nerved it four hundred years before through Aneurin and Llywarch 
Hen to its struggle with the earliest Englishmen. At the hour 
of its lowest degradation the silence of Wales was suddenly broken 
by a crowd of singers. The song of the twelfth century burst 
forth, not from one bard or another, but from the nation at large. 
The Welsh temper, indeed, was steeped in poetry. ' In every 
house,' says the shrewd Gerald du Barri, ' strangers who arrived 
in the morning were entertained till eventide with the talk of 
maidens and the music of the harp.' A romantic literature, which 
was destined to leaven the fancy of Western Europe, had grown 
Tip among this wild people, and found an admirable means of 
utterance in its tongue. The Welsh language was as real a devel- 
opment of the old Celtic language, heard by Caesar, as the Ro- 
mance tongues are the developments of Caesar's Latin ; but, at a 
far earlier date than any other language of modern Europe, it had 
attained to definite structure and to settled literary form. No 
other mediaeval literature shows at its outset the same elaborated 
and completed organization as that of the Welsh. But within these 
settled forms the Celtic fancy played with a startling freedom. ' ' 

In that old Welsh collection of poems called the " Mabinogion" 
— Juvenile Diversions — treasured and preserved by the Welsh, 
and translated latterly into English by Lady Charlotte Guest, and 
also by Owen Pugh — of this Celtic fancy we have some fine 
illustrations as taken from it by the late historian John Richard 
Green. 

"The gay extravagance of these 'Mabinogion,' " remarks Mr. 
Green, "flings defiance to all fact, tradition, probability, and 
revels in the impossible and unreal. When Arthur sails into the 
unknown world it is in a ship of glass. The ' descent into Hell,' 
as a Celtic poet paints it, shakes mediaeval horrors with mediaeval 
reverence ; and the knight who achieves the quest spends his 
years of infernal durance in hunting and minstrelsy, and in con- 



154 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

verse with fair women. The Mabinogion constitute a world of 
pure fantasy, a new earth of marvels and enchantments, of dark 
forests whose silence is broken by the hermit's bell, and of sunny 
glades where the light plays on the hero's armor. Each figure, 
as it moves across the poet's canvas, is bright with glancing color. 
"The maiden was clothed in a robe of name-colored silk, and 
about her neck was a collar of ruddy gold in which were precious 
emeralds and rubies. Her head was of brighter gold than the 
flower of the broom, her skin was whiter than the foam of the 
wave, and fairer were her hands and her fingers than the blossoms 
of the wood-anemone amidst the spray of the meadow fountain. 
The eye of the trained hawk, the glance of the falcon, was not 
brighter than hers. Her bosom was more snowy than the breast 
of the white swan, her cheek was redder than the reddest roses. 
Everywhere there is an Oriental profusion of gorgeous imagery, 
but the gorgeousness is seldom oppressive. 

"The sensibility of the Celtic temper, so quick to perceive 
beauty, so eager in its thirst for life, its emotions, its adventures, 
its sorrows and its joys, is tempered by a passionate melancholy, 
that expresses its revolt against the impossible, by an instinct of 
what is noble, by a sentiment that discovers the weird charm of 
nature. The wildest extravagance of two tale-tellers is relieved 
by some graceful play of pure fancy, some tender note of feeling, 
some magical touch of beauty. At Kalweh's ground from side 
to side of their master's steed, they 'sport around him like two 
sea -swallows.' His spear is 'swifter than the fall of the dew-drop 
from the blade of reed-grass upon the earth when the dew of June 
is the heaviest.' A subtle, observant love of nature and natural 
beauty takes fresh color from the passionate human sentiment 
with which it is imbued. 'I love the birds' sings Gwalchmai, 
'and their sweet voices in the lulling songs of the wood;' he 
watches at night beside the fords ' among the untrodden grass ' 
to hear the Nightingale and watch the play of the sea-mew. Even 
patriotism takes the same picturesque form. 

' ' The Welsh poet hates the flat and sluggish land of the Saxon : 
as he dwells on his own he tells of ' its sea-coast and its mountains, 
its towns on the forest border, its fair landscape, its dales, its waters 
and its valleys, its white sea-mews, its beauteous women. ' Here as 
elsewhere the sentiment of nature passed swiftly and subtly into, 
the sentiment of human tenderness : ' I love its fields clothed 
with tender tree -foil ' goes on the song : ' I love the marches of 



BALLADS 1 55 

Merioneth where my head was pillowed on a snow-white arm.' 
In the Celtic love of woman there is little of the Teutonic depth 
and earnestness ; but in its stead, a childlike spirit of delicate enjoy- 
ment, a faint distant flush of passion like the rose light of dawn 
on a snowy mountain peak, a playful delight in beauty. 'White 
is my love as the apple blossom, as the ocean's spray; her face 
shines like the pearly dew on Eryri ; the glow of her cheeks is 
like the light of sunset.' Thus the singer sings. The buoyant 
and elastic temper of the French Trouvere was spiritualized in the 
Welsh- singers by a more refined poetic feeling. 'Who so beheld 
her was filled with her love. Four white trefoils sprang up 
wherever she trod.' A touch of pure fancy such as this removes 
its object out of the sphere of passion into one of delight and 
reverence." 

§ 71. Ballads. 

Ballad literature came into strong life in Europe during the 
thirteenth, and especially during the fourteenth and fifteenth centu- 
ries. In the thirteenth, Spain uttered through national ballads the 
soul of freedom in her struggle against the Moors. English ballads 
are akin to those, which also among the Scandinavians became a 
familiar, social amusement of the people. They were recited by 
one of a company with animation and varying expression, while 
the rest kept time, often with joining hands, forming a circle, ad- 
vancing, returning, balancing, sometimes remaining still, and by 
various movements and gestures following changes of emotion in 
the story. From this manner of enjoying them the ballads took 
their name. Ballare is a middle-Latin word, meaning to incline to 
this side or that, with which the Italians associate their name for 
dancing, and we the word ' ' ball ' ' for the name of a dancing party. 

The ballads of England as well as those of other countries have 
been mostly derived from afar. We know nothing of their authors 
or their historical date. Eike the Volkslieder of other countries 
these ballads were composed by the people for the people. They 
often dealt with topics common to the peasant singers of Denmark, 
France, Greece, Italy, and the Slavonic countries. The wide 
distribution of these topics is like the distribution of popular tales, 
a mark of great antiquity. The poets or narrators of these were a 
very different class from the wandering Troubadours or the Jong- 
leurs of Southern Europe and of France ; and living in a country 
much less ruder and chivalrous, though certainly not less warlike 
than Languedoc and Provence, their compositions are inimitable 



156 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

for simple pathos, fiery intensity of feeling, and picturesqueness 
of description. In every country there must exist some typical or 
natural form of versification, adapted to the genius of the language 
and to the mode of declamation or musical accompaniment, gen- 
erally employed for assisting the effect. Thus the legendary poetry 
of the Greeks naturally took the form of the Homeric hexameter, 
and that of the Spaniards the loose assonante versification, as in 
the ballads of the Cid, so well adapted to the accompaniment of 
the guitar, The English ballads, almost without exception, affect 
the iambic measure of twelve or fourteen syllables, rhyming 
in couplets, which, however, naturally divide themselves by means 
of the Ccesura or pause, into stanzas of four lines, the rhymes 
generally occurring at the end of the second and fourth verses. 
This form of metre is found predominating throughout all these 
interesting relics ; and was itself, in all probability, a relic of old 
long unrhymed alliterative used by the Saxon poets. 

The best of ballads are those which, in mediaeval times, among 
the most Northern people of Teutonic origin, were orally commu- 
nicated from one generation to another, before printing had been 
invented or come into general use. These are generally of a 
romantic order, narrating the most tragical events of love and 
murder, full of melancholy pathos, but expressed in the simplest 
language, and without any violent outbreaks of feeling. Though 
originating with the common people, their incidents were not gen- 
erally taken by these from among themselves, but from the higher 
classes, whom they held in the most worshipful love and respect, 
and whose family legends they were wont to clothe in the most 
weird and supernatural glamor and romance. 

Though originating in the most northern countries the subjects 
of these ballads were often appropriated and located in countries 
farther south. Thus The Douglas Tragedy is assumed by the 
Scotch to have taken place on their own land, as no doubt it had, 
and the scenes of the several incidents are still to be pointed out 
there distinctly at the present day ; but the chief of these are bor- 
rowed, being much the same as those narrated in the older ballads 
of Ribolt and Gulbory, belonging to Denmark. 

The English ballads, on the whole, are inferior in romance to 
the Lowland Scotch, being too often flat, garrulous, spiritless and 
diadactic . For example, of the ' ' battle of Otterburn, " or " Chevy 
Chase," fought 1388, we have two descriptive ballads, the one 
English and the other Scottish. In the English ballad, indeed, 



BAIXADS 1 57 

there is a passage that has won the praise of Addison. It runs 

thus : 

With that there came an arrow keene; 

Out of an English bow, 
Which struck Karl Douglass on the breast, 

A deepe and deadly blow. 

Who never said more words than these, 

" Fight on, my merry men, all ! 
For why, my life is at an end, 

Lord Pearcy sees my fall." 

In the Scotch ballad the event is prepared by a dream which 
visits Douglas, singularly impressive and romantic. Thus: 
But I hae dreamed a dreary dream, 

Beyond the Isle of Sk}^ ; 
I saw a dead man in a fight, 
But I think that man was I. 

This supernatural effect is repeated at the moment of Douglas's 
fall, and thus a new charm is won for the poem, which is missed 
in "Chevy Chase." The supernatural is almost invariably treated 
in a gross and flat style by the English balladists. 

To account for and to apologize for this inferiority of English 
ballads, good as they are, to those of other European nations, 
Mr. Andrew Lang remarks that "the vast majority of these Eng- 
lish ballads have not been collected from oral tradition, like the 
ballads of the Scotch Border, of Italy, and of Greece. As soon 
as printing was firmly established in England the traditional songs 
were distributed in cheap broad sheets. These songs may origi- 
nally have been Volkslieder : many of them, indeed, can have been 
nothing else. In passing, however, through the hands of the 
printers and poor scholars who prepared them for the press, they 
became dull, long, and diadactic. The loyalty, good-humor, and 
love of the free air and the green -wood remain ; but the clerks 
have spoiled the praise of Robin Hood, the good outlaw." The 
ballads wandered through the land, corrupted from the simplicity 
that pleased the untaught, into harmony with the roughest edu- 
cated taste. By Addison's time these broad-sheet ballads had 
been pasted on the walls of the country houses. ' ' In the country, ' ' 
says The Spectatoi r — June 7, 171 1 — "I cannot for my heart leave a 
room before I have thoroughly studied the walls of it and exam-* 
ined the several printed papers that are usually pasted on them." 
And on a wall Addison says he found the old ballad of The Chil- 
dren in the Wood, which is one of the darling songs of the common 
people. 



158 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

§ 71. John of Ti'evisa. 

John of Trevisa was a native of Cornwall, but resided chiefly 
in Gloucestershire, being Vicar of Berkley and chaplain to Thomas 
Lord Berkley. His best-known work is a translation of Ralph 
Higdon's Polychronicon, which was completed A. D. 1482, with a 
continuation of the narrative from 1357 to 1460. 

' ' As an evidence of the change which the English had made in 
the course of seventy-five years the following sentence," says 
Corson, "from Caxton's preface may be cited: 'I, William Cax- 
ton, a simple person, have endeavored to writ first over all the 
said book of Polychronicon, and somewhat have changed the rude 
and old English, that is to wit, certain words which in these days 
be neither used ne understood.' " 

We see the general advance of English in these two passages 
from two writers of Edward's and Richard's reigns. " Children in 
school," says Higdon, a writer from the first period, "against the 
usage and manner of all other nations, be compelled to leave their 
own language and for to construe their lessons and their things in 
French, and so they have since the Normans first came into Eng- 
land. Also gentlemen children be taught for to speak French 
from the time that they be rocked in the cradle, and know how to 
speak and play with a child's toy; and upland, or countrymen 
will liken themselves to gentlemen and strive with great busyness 
to speak French for to be more told of." "This manner," adds 
John of Trevisa, Higdon's translator in Richard's time, "was 
much used before the Murrain — the Black Death of 1349 — and is 
somewhat changed. For John of Cornwall, a master of grammar, 
changed the lore in grammar school and construeing of French 
into English ; and Richard Pencrych learned this manner of teach- 
ing of him, as other men did of Pencrych. So that now, the year 
of our Lord 1385, and of the second, King Richard, nine, in all the 
grammar schools of England, children leaveth French and con- 
strueth and learneth in English . Also gentlemen have now much 
left for to teach their children French." 

§ 72. Occleve and Lydgate. 

Of Chaucer's immediate disciples, two acquired some celebrity, 
Occleve and Lydgate. Thomas Occleve — 1 370-1454 — was a mis- 
erable versifier of the reign of Henry V. His famous lament for 
his "Maister Chaucer" has secured for him a place in literature, 



DECLINE OF LITERATURE IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY 1 59 

but the rest of his poetry is worthless. John Lydgate — 1 374-1460 
— was for half of a century the most popular poet of England. 
He wrote pageants for the Court of Henry VI , Masques and May 
Entertainments for the Sheriff of London, a miserable play for the 
festival of Corpus Christi, and Ballads for the amusement of his 
fellow-monks. His chief poems were: The Storie of Thebes, a 
translation from Latin, thrown into the form of an additional Can- 
terbury tale, told by the author who supposes himself to have 
met Chaucer's Pilgrims at Canterbury and returned with them to 
London ; The Fall of Princes, taken from Boccaccio ; and the 
Troy Book, taken from the French. 

After the death of Chaucer, however, no literary masterpiece 
was produced for more than one hundred and fifty years . 

From the year 1400 there was a steady intellectual decline, and 
the reigns of Edward V, Richard III and Henry VII, constitute 
the darkest period in English literature, but under Henry VIII, 
appeared a brighter gleam of light, which waxed brighter until 
the brilliant Elizabethan age. The causes of this dark period 
are manifest : firstly, the Hundred Years' War oppressed the people 
with heavy taxations, thereby producing civil discontent, greatly 
aggravated by the losses in France under the Lancastrian House ; 
secondly, the Wars of the Roses filled England for thirty years 
with bloodshed and political confusion, rendering the country 
unfit for literary culture ; and, thirdly, when at last the nation was 
enclosed again in the peace and security of an absolute monarchy, 
it became intellectually embroiled in religious disputes — the Angli- 
can Reformation, though sowing seeds of future literary expansion, 
for a time engrossed men's mind, with doctrinal thought. 

§ 73. Decline of Literature in the Fifteenth Century. 
Of the six remaining Plantagenet Kings, three were of the 
House of Lancaster : 

Henry IV, from 1399 to 1413, 
Henry V, from 141 3 to 1422, 
Henry VI, from 1422 to 147 1 : 
and three of the House of York : 

Edward IV, from 1461 to 1484, 

Edward V, from 1483, for two months — then murdered. 
Richard III, from 1483 to 1485. 
The reign of these kings, taken as a whole, commenced with the 
beginning of the fifteenth century, and continued under them 



160 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

severally till 1485, thus being still comprehended in the Middle 
Ages, before or during the Renascence, and mostly before the 
taking of Constantinople by the Turks, in 1453. 

"The century which, after the death of Petrarch," says M. 
Sismondi, "had been devoted by the Italians to the study ol 
antiquity, during which literature . experienced no advance, and 
the Italian language seemed to retrograde, was not, however, lost 
to the power of imagination. Poetry, on its first revival, had not 
received sufficient nourishment. The fund of knowledge, of ideas 
and of images, which she called to her aid, was too restricted. 
The three great men of the fourteenth century, Dante, Petrarch 
and Boccaccio, had by the sole force of their genius, attained a 
degree of erudition and a sublimity of thought, far beyond the 
spirit of their age. These qualities were entirely personal; and 
the rest of the Italian bards, like the Provencal poets, were reduced, 
by the poverty of their ideas, to have resource to those continual 
attempts at wit, and to that inixture of unintelligible ideas and 
incoherent images, which render the perusal of them so fatiguing. 
The whole of the fifteenth century was employed in extending, 
in every sense, the knowledge and resources of the friends of the 
muses. Antiquity was unveiled to them in all its elevated 
characters, its severe laws, its energetic virtues, and its beautiful 
and engaging mythology ; in its subtle and profound philosophy, 
its overpowering eloquence, and its delightful poetry. Another 
age was required to knead afresh the clay for the formation of a 
nobler race. At the close of the century, a divine breath animated 
the finished statue, and it started into life." 

The fifteenth century seems to have been an age of active prepa- 
ration in every country of Europe. Though no great books were 
produced in it, it witnessed the invention of the art of printing, 
the effect of which was so to multiply copies of the masterpieces 
of Greek and Roman genius, to reduce their price, and to enlarge 
the circle of their readers so as to supply abundantly new materials 
for thought, and new models of artistic form ; and thus pave the 
way for the great writers at the close of the next century. Print- 
ing, invented at Mainz by Gutenberg, about the year 1450, was 
introduced into England by William Caxton in 1474. 

The blank, however, in literature, in the sciences, and in the 
arts in England, during the fifteenth century, is more especially to 
be attributed to the foreign wars carried on in France by the two 
Henrys, the Fourth and the Fifth ; and to the domestic and inter- 



DECLINE OF LITERATURE IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY 161 

necine wars carried on during the often intercepted reign of 
Henry VI, by the aspiring contestors of the rival Houses of York 
and Lancaster for the throne, called the Wars of the White and 
Red Roses, which were continued through the decapitating reigns 
of Edward IV and Richard III, bringing the succession of the 
Plantagenets to a close ; Richard being slain at the battle of Bos- 
worth Field in 1845. 



Had the Plantagenets, as at one time seemed likely, succeeded 
in uniting all France under their government, it is probable that 
England would never have had an independent existence. Her 
princes, her lords, her prelates would have been men differing 
from the artisans and the tillers of the earth. The revenues of 
her great proprietors would have been spent in festivities and 
diversions on the banks of the Seine. The noble language of 
Milton and Burke would have remained a rustic dialect, without 
a literature, a fixed grammar, or a fixed orthography; and it 
would have been contemptuously abandoned to the use of boors. 

England owes her escape from such calamities to an event which 
her historians have generally represented as disastrous. Her 
interests were so directly opposed to the interests of her rulers 
that she had no hope but in their errors and misfortunes. The 
talents and even the virtues of her six first French kings were a 
curse to her. The follies and views of the seventh were her salvation. 
Had John inherited the great qualities of his father, of Henry 
Beauclerc, or of the Conqueror; nay, had he even possessed the 
martial courage of Stephen or of Richard, and had the King of 
France at the same time been as capable as all the other successors 
of Hugh Capet had been, the House of the Plantagenets must have 
risen to unrivalled ascendency in Europe. But, just at this con- 
juncture, France, for the first time since the death of Charlemagne, 
was governed by a prince of great firmness and ability. 

On the other hand, England, which, since the battle of Hastings, 
had been ruled generally by wise statesmen, always by brave 
soldiers, fell under the dominion of a trifler and a coward. From 
that moment her prospects brightened. John was driven from 
Normandy. The Norman nobles were compelled to make their 
election between the Island and the Continent. Shut up by the 
sea with the people whom they have hitherto oppressed and 
despised, they gradually came to regard England as their country, 
12 



162 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

and the English as their countrymen. The two races, so long 
hostile, soon found that they had common interests and common 
enemies. Both were alike aggrieved by the tyranny of the bad 
king. Both were alike indignant at the favor shown by the Court 
to the natives of Poitiers and Aquitaine. The great grandsons 
of those who had fought under Harold began to draw nearer to 
each other in friendship, and the first pledge of their reconciliation 
was the Great Charter of John, won by their united exertions, and, 
framed for their common benefit. 

Here commences the history of the English nation. The history 
of the preceding events is the history of wrongs inflicted, and 
sustained by the various tribes which indeed all dwelt on English 
ground, but which regarded each other with aversion, such as has 
scarcely ever existed between communities separated by physical 
barriers. For even the mutual animosity of countries at war with 
each other is languid when compared with the animosity of 
nations which, morally separated, are yet locally intermingled. 
In no country has the enmity of race been carried farther than in 
England : in no country has that enmity been more completely 
effaced. The stages of the process, by which the hostile elements 
were melted down into one homogeneous mass, are not accurately 
known to us. But it is certain that when John became king, the 
distinction between Saxons and Normans was strongly marked ; 
and that before the end of the reign of his grandson, it had almost, 
disappeared. In the time of Richard the First, the ordinary im- 
precation of a Norman gentleman was, "May I become an 
Englishman?" The ordinary form of indignant denial was, "Do 
you take me for an Englishman ? ' ' The descendants of such a 
gentleman a hundred years later were proud of the English name, 

§ 74. The Black Death. 
In the year 1349, when the Black Death, the greatest of the pes- 
tilences of the fourteenth century, spread over Europe, Chaucer, 
Gower, Wickliffe and Langland, were young men ; Petrarch was 
about forty-five ; his Laura was among the victims of that dread- 
ful plague ; and Boccaccio was only thirty-six years old. These 
pestilences meant that, although literature was advancing, there 
were no advances whatever toward the laws of health. Famine, 
as usual, preceded pestilence. In Florence, in April, 1347, ninety- 
four thousand twelve-ounce loaves were daily given to the poor to 
meet the urgent need. Children were dying of hunger in their 



ALLEGORICAL POKTRY 163 

mothers' arms. The Plague, spreading from the Bast, was already 
in Cyprus, Sicily, Marseilles, and in some of the Italian seaport 
towns. In January, 1348, it broke out upon Avignon, where the 
Rhone was consecrated by the Pope that bodies might be thrown 
into it. In one burial ground in London fifty thousand of the 
plague -stricken are said to have been placed in layers in large pits. 
It is said that by the Black Death Europe lost twenty-five millions 
of her inhabitants. Into the crowd of the plague-stricken at the 
Hotel Diere, when the deaths were five hundred a day, high- 
hearted women entered as Sisters of Charity ; and as they died at 
their posts, there was never a want of others to come in and take 
their places. Merchants, struck with terror, offered their wealth to 
the Church. The deaths of owners of estates brought wealth to 
the religious houses, and made lawyers busy. But above all, the 
plague, believed to be a scourge for sin, was looked on as God's 
call to repentance. Another sweep of pestilence, again preceded 
by famine, crossed over into England in 1360, another in 1373, and 
another in 1382. It was said that of the plague of 1349 the poor 
were the chief victims, but that of 1360 struck especially the rich. 
It is from this plague that one of the great songs of England in the 
fourteenth century, Langland's Vision of Piers Ploughman, had 
its origin. 

§ 75. Allegorical Poetry. 
The Troubadours of Southern France were the first of modern 
poets to introduce allegory into their poems. At first the songs of 
these had all been either amatory or martial. But to some of their 
longer poems they wished to impart a philosophical or moral 
meaning, after the manner of the Arabians ; and for this purpose, 
like them, they made use of allegory. Among the first who fol- 
lowed this fashion was Pierre Vidal, of Toulouse, a Troubadour, 
who had followed King Richard to the Third Crusade. One of his 
verses, or long poems, is a new allegory, in which the principal 
personages whom he introduces are Love, Mercy, Modesty, and 
Loyalty, some of the allegorical beings which the East had given 
to the Provencals, and such as afterwards figured in the Triumphs 
of Petrarch. The Love of the Provencals, as this poem shows, 
was not Cupid the son of Venus ; and these romantic allegories 
are not borrowed from the Pagan mythology. The Cavalier Love 
of Pierre Vidal is clothed in the costume of the chivalric age which 
gave him birth. His suite is composed of the chivalric virtues, 
and not of joys and smiles. The whole idea bears the character 



164 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

of another age. Love, indeed, by the poets of the East was most 
frequently represented as seated on the wings of a parroquet: 
whence the Provencals, in imitation of the Arabians, have often 
introduced that richly plumaged bird into their songs as the mes- 
senger of Love. 

The sweet singing of Southern Europe, too much separated from 
the active energies of life, had dwelt upon love as a conventional 
theme, treated by poets with more care for the music of language 
than for living truth of thought. The monasteries, in the thir- 
teenth century, still claimed to be the centres of culture ; and if the 
monks, vowed to celibacy, might not sing, like other men, of love, 
which was accounted the one noble theme, they could adapt the 
fashion to their use, and tell the world that, when they sang a lady's 
praise, the lady was the Church, the Virgin, or some object of 
heavenly regard. Habitual symbolism among many Fathers of the 
Church had helped churchmen with a previous training to this use 
of allegory. It had arisen in the early Church, especially among 
the Greek Fathers, with ingenious interpretations of the Scriptures. 
Baeda, following this example, showed how in Solomon's Temple 
the windows represented holy teachers, through which enters the 
light of heaven, and the cedar was the incorruptible beauty of the 
virtues. The ingenuity of double sense added a charm to verse- 
making, and the taste for allegory spread. 

Guillaume de Lorris, a Troubadour in the valley of the Loire, 
began, during the first thirty years of this century, the thirteenth, 
an allegorical Romance of the Rose which he left unfinished ; and 
between the years 1270 and 1282 Jean de Meun finished it, and 
put so much of the bolder spirit of his time into the manner of his 
finishing, with satire against the Church and society, that the 
Romance of the Rose henceforth acquired wide fame and influence 
beyond the borders of its native France. The Germans, who have 
named all modern poetry i-omantic, have supposed all the literature 
of the Romance nations to have originated from Christianity, or, at 
least, to have been closely connected with it. The poetry of the 
Provencals, however, bears no traces of this source. It contains 
very few religious pieces : none which display enthusiasm ; nor any 
where does Christianity form part of the sentiment or of the action. 
When by chance religion is introduced, if it be not merely some 
hymn to the Virgin, a poor imitation from the Latin Church 
service, it is in a profane way. The longer pieces, or tales of the 
Troubadours, moreover, have nothing romantic or warlike about 



THK FABLIAUX 165 

them. They always relate the allegorical personages, Mercy, 
Lo3^ality, Modesty, and the like, whose duty it is to speak and not 
to act. A romantic imagination was rarely discovered among 
them ; whilst the Trouveres, the poets and reciters of tales in the 
countries north of the Loire, invented or perfected all the ancient 
romances of chivalry; and from the Langue d'oil, the language 
of these North countries, the French was afterwards formed. This 
language was spoken at first in the English Court after the Norman 
Conquest, and the literature it contained for a long while was the 
same in England as that in Normandy. 

§ 76. The Fabliaux. 

Besides the romances of chivalry which were cultivated mostly 
in Normandy, the French in general possessed another species of 
poetr}^ called the Fabliaux, treasures of invention, originality, 
simplicity and gaiety, of which other nations can furnish no 
instances but by borrowing from the French. These were always 
written in verse. The French, who naturally accounted elegance 
and easiness of style to be the essence of poetry, availed them- 
selves with eagerness of every tale of gallantry, and every adven- 
ture or anecdote, which could awaken curiosity or excite mirth. 
These they put into verse and then called themselves poets, whilst 
every other nation reserved such subjects for prose. A collection 
of Indian tales, called The King and the Seven Wise Men, having 
been translated into Latin, about the tenth or eleventh century, 
was the first storehouse of the Trouveres. The Arabian tales, 
which were transmitted by the Moors to the Castilians, and by the 
latter to the French, were in their turn versified. Even the 
romantic adventures of the Provencal Knights and Troubadours 
furnished the Trouveres with subjects for their poetic tales. But, 
above all, the anecdotes which they collected in the towns and 
castles of France ; the adventures of lovers ; the tricks which were 
played upon the jealousy and credulity of husbands ; the gallantries 
of priests, and the disorders of convents, supplied the reciters of 
tales with inexhaustible materials for their ludicrous narratives. 

These versified tales had no moral interwoven or attached. They 
were not didactic, but intended wholly for amusement. At this 
time there were neither theatrical entertainments nor games at 
cards, to fill up the leisure hours of society. It was found necessary 
to devise some means of passing the long evenings in courts and 
castles, and even in private houses ; and the Trouveres, or relaters 



166 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

of tales, were, therefore, welcomed with an eagerness proportioned 
to the store of anecdotes which they brought with them to enliven 
conversation. Whatever was the subject of their verse, they were 
equally acceptable. Legends, miracles, and licentious anecdotes, 
were related b}^ the sanie men to the same companies ; and in the 
collections of the ancient Fabliaux we find stories of the most 
opposite kind immediately succeeding each other. The most 
numerous — preserved in the Royal Library at Paris — are those 
tales properly so called, which were the models of those of Boc- 
caccio, of the Queen of Navarre, and of La Fontaine. Some of 
these old fables have had great fame. They have been succes- 
sively reproduced by all who have any pretensions to the narrative 
art, and they have passed from age to age, and from tongue to 
tongue, down to our own days. Some of the Fabliaux very nearly 
approach the romances of Chivalry; describing, like them, the 
heroic manners of the nobles, and not the vices of the common 
people. These alone are really poetical, and display a creative 
imagination, graceful pictures, elevated sentiments, lively repre- 
sentations of character, and that mixture of the supernatural which 
so completely seduces the imagination. 

The French, though delighting in rhymes, are not a poetical 
people. To narrate with neatness, clearness, and a degree of 
simplicity, to which at the same time elegance, precision of 
expression, and a mixture of abstract sentiments are united, 
appeared to the French at this time to be the essence of the poetical 
art. They delighted in agreeable emotions, but were not fitted 
for deep sensations. Nothing was more opposite to their genius 
than the genuine songs and profound hymns, such as the English 
monks in the same times were singing beneath the low vaults of 
the churches. They would be disconcerted by the unevenness and 
obscurity of such language. They were not capable of such an 
excess of enthusiasm and such excess of emotions. They never 
cry out, they speak, or rather the}^ converse, and that at moments 
when the soul, overwhelmed by its troubles, might be expected 
to cease thinking and feeling. Grace is a national possession in 
France and springs from the native delicacy which has a horror 
of incongruities ; the instinct of Frenchmen avoids violent shocks ; 
in works of taste as well as in works of argument, they desire 
that their sentiments and ideas shall harmonize and not clash. 
Throughout they have this measured spirit, exquisitely refined. 

The French are the only people, who in poetry look to the object 



THE ROMANCE OF CHIVALRY 167 

of the composition ; and they perhaps understand better than any 
other nation how to accomplish their purpose. They, therefore, 
always write with a definite aim in view ; whilst other nations 
conceive it to be the essence of poetry not to seek any certain 
object, but to abandon themselves to unpremeditated and spon- 
taneous transports, courting poetry from inspiration alone. They 
had, to be sure, their Fabliaux, whose only object was to amuse 
and delight; they had also for the same purpose their jeu d' 
esprits, their bon-mots, their entendres and the like, whose very 
names, though used in English, betray their French origin ; but in 
their higher poems they had always set before them some instruc- 
tive object of which they never lost sight. The allegorical form 
of poetry, therefore, was very soon adopted by the French for this 
end, gratifying not only their national taste for narrative pieces, 
but the still more national attachment they had for compositions 
which unite wit and argument to a moral aim. This form of 
poetry was received by the Trouveres from the Troubadours, who 
had before that, most probably, derived it from the Arabians. 

The* Romance of the Rose originated in Southern France, but 
it was afterwards adopted into Normandy much enlarged. It is 
a fatiguing poem. All human virtues and vices are personified 
and introduced upon the scene. One allegory is linked to another, 
and the imagination wanders amongst these fictitious beings, upon 
whom it is impossible to bestow any corporeal attributes. We are 
far more willing to bestow our attention upon a poem which relates 
to human feelings and actions, however insignificant they may be, 
than upon one which is full of abstract sentiments and ideas, 
represented under the names of men and women. At the period, 
however, when the Romance of the Rose first appeared, the less 
it interested the reader as a narrative, the more it was admired as 
a work of intellect, as a fine moral conception, and as philosophy 
clothed in the garb of poetry. Brilliant passages struck the eye 
at every line ; the object of the author was never out of sight ; and 
since poetry was regarded by the French as the vehicle of agree- 
able instruction, they must necessarily have been of opinion that 
the Romance of the Rose was admirably calculated for attaining 
this end, as it contained a rich mine of pleasing information. 

§ 77 . The Romances of Chivalry. 

The metrical romances of the Normans were not altogether 
fictitious. They were founded on assumed historical legends, which 



168 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

were received by the people as being true history. Of these there 
were two great classes claiming to be derived from two distant 
historical sources. Of one of these the Court of Charlemagne and 
his Paladins, in the eighth century, are made the subjects. The 
most ancient monument of the marvellous exploits of these heroes 
is contained in the pseudonymous Chronicle of Turpin, Archbishop 
of Rheims, as he was styled; but the name and person of this 
prelate who is supposed to be contemporary with Charlemagne, are 
ficticious. This book, which became the source of the Charle- 
magne romance, may possibly have been invented by order of 
the Pope, who, in 1 122, in the reign of Henry I, guaranteed the 
authorship of Turpin. But the most beautiful, as well as the most 
important romances of chivalry, are those which may be grouped 
under the name of Arthurian romances. In these the exploits of 
Arthur, son of Pendragon, the last British king who defended 
England against the Anglo-Saxons, are celebrated as already said. 

§ 78. English Castles. 

With Feudalism the building of Castles by the Normans, came 
into England. Both the name and the things themselves were 
new to the English. To fortify a town, to build a citadel for 
protecting a town, were processes with which England had long 
been familiar. To contribute to such necessary public works was 
one of the three immemorial obligations from which no English- 
man could free himself. But for a private landholder to raise a 
private fortress, to be the terror of his neighbors, was something 
to which Englishmen had been unaccustomed. Wherever a 
Norman castle was reared in England, it became the object of 
the bitterest of all hatred, as the living embodiment of the foreign 
yoke. These tall, massive square keeps, wherever they are left, 
are now looked upon as the most venerable and precious antiqui- 
ties of England. And venerable and precious they are, now that 
they stand in ruins, as the memorials of a time which has forever 
passed away. But when those towers were still newly built, when 
their square stones were still in their freshness, when the arches, 
of their doors and windows were still sharp and newly cut, to the 
men of those days they were the objects of a horror deeper even 
than that with which France, in the moment of her uprising, 
looked on the Bastile of her ancient kings. To English eyes the 
castle was an accursed thing, to be swept away from the earth by 
the stroke of a neighbor's vengeance, as when liberated Syracuse 



THE MORALITIES 169 

swept away the citadel from where her tyrants had held her in 
thraldom. 

Normandy had, during the minority of Willam, been covered 
with such buildings and his wise policy had leveled many of 
them to the ground. Such strongholds, strange to English 
e3^es, have no English name, but retains their French designation 
of castles. Such a thing became at once a centre of all kinds of 
oppression. Men were harbored in it and deeds were done such 
as could find no place in the hall of the ancient English Theyn, 
or Thane. In the anarchy and confusion of Stephen's reign, 
when he was inclined to refuse terms of capitulation to the rebels, 
the barons even of his own party pleaded for them, because they 
had taken no oath of allegiance to the king, but had taken up 
arms only in discharge of duty to their lord. This was pushing 
the feudal doctrine to the extreme point, to the point at which it 
upsets all regular government. In his reign began the time of 
which the native chronicler has left us such an imperishable 
record. It was the time when every rich man his castles made, 
when the land was full of castle-works, and when, as the castles 
were made, they filled them with devils and evil men. Those were 
the days when, if two men or three came visiting to a town all the 
township fled for them, and weened that they were reavers — that 
means robbers. Those w^ere the days too when wretched men 
starved of hunger ; when some lived on alms that were somewhile 
rich men ; and some fled out of the land. In those days the earth 
bore no corn, for the land w T as all foredone by such deeds; and 
men said openly that Christ slept, and His Hallows also, that is, 
His Saints. 

§79. The Moralities. 

The first stage in the wa}^ of laicizing the drama was the substi- 
tution for the Miracle-play of another kind of representation, 
entitled a Morality. This species of entertainment seems to have 
been popular from about the beginning of the fifteenth century 
and gradually supplanted the exclusively religious Mystery. The 
composition as well as the representation of these pieces was far 
less exclusively in the hands of ecclasiastics, w T ho thus began to 
lose their influence over the popular mind, which they had derived 
from their monopoly of knowledge. The subjects of these dramas, 
instead of being purely religious, were moral, as their name 
implies ; and the ethical lessons were conveyed by an action 
and dramatis persona; of an abstract or allegorical kind. The 



170 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

action was in general exceedingly ample and the tone grave and 
doctrinal, though of course the same subjects existed as before 
the introduction of comic scenes. The Devil was far too popular 
and useful a personage to be suppressed ; so his battles or scoldings 
with the Vice or Clown were still retained to furnish forth a " fit of 
mirth . ' ' To form some idea of the general character of these dramas 
let us take the analysis of one entitled " The Cradle of Security." 
It was intended as a lesson to careless and sensual sovereigns. 
The principal person is a king, who, neglecting his high duties and 
plunging into voluptuous pleasures, is put to sleep in a cradle, to 
which he is bound by golden chains, held by four beautiful ladies, 
who sing as they rock the cradle. Suddenly the courtiers are all 
dispersed by a terrible knocking at the door, and the king, awaken- 
ing, finds himself in the custod}^ of two stern and tremendous 
figures sent from God to punish his voluptuousness and vice. In 
a similar way the action of the Morality Lusty Juventas contains a 
vivid and even humorous picture of the extravagance and 
debauchery of a young heir, surrounded by companions, the 
Virtues and the Vices, some of whom endeavor in vain to restrain 
his passions, while others flatter his depraved inclinations. The 
piece also ends with a demonstration of the inevitable misery and 
punishment, which follow a departure from the paths of virtue and 
religion . 

§ 80. The New Learning in England — 14.85-1509. 
" From the first," says John Richard Green, " it was manifest 
that the revival of letters would take a tone in England, very dif- 
ferent from the tone it had taken in Italy, a tone less literary, less 
largely human, but more moral, more religious, more practical in 
its bearings both upon society and politics. The awakening of a 
national Christianity, whether in England or in the Teutonic world 
at large, begins with the Italian studies of John Colet, and the 
vigor and earnestness of this individual were the best proofs of 
the strength with which the new movement was to affect English 
religion. He came back to Oxford utterly untouched by the Pla- 
tonic mysticism, or the semi-serious infidelity, which characterized 
the group of scholars round Lorenzo, the Magnificent. He was 
hardly more influenced by their literary enthusiasm. The knowl- 
edge of Greek seems to have had almost one end for him, and 
this was a religious end. Greek was the key by which he could 
understand the Gospel and the New Testament, and in these he 
thought he could find a new religious ground on which to stand. 



SIR THOMAS MORE 171 

It was this resolve of Colet to throw aside the additional dogmas 
of his day, and to discover a rational and practical religion in the 
Gospels themselves, which gave its peculiar stamp to the theology 
of the Renaissance. His faith stood simply on a vivid realization 
of the Person of Christ. In the prominence which such view gave 
to the moral life ; in his free criticisms of the earlier Scriptures ; 
and in his tendency to simple forms of doctrine and confessions 
of faith, Colet struck the key-note of a mode of religious thought 
as strongly in contrast with that of the Reformation as with that 
of Catholicism itself. The allegorical and mystical theology, in 
which the Middle Ages had spent their intellectual vigor to such 
little purpose, fell before his rejection of all but the historical and 
grammatical sense of the Biblical text. In his lectures on the 
Romans we find hardly a single quotation from the Fathers or the 
scholastic teachers. The great fabric of belief built up by the 
mediaeval doctors seemed to him simply the corruptions of the 
schoolmen. In the life and sayings of its Founder he saw a 
simple and rational Christianity, whose fittest expression was the 
Apostles' Creed. "About the rest," he said with characteristic 
impatience, " let divines dispute as long as they will." He was 
born in 1466 and died in 15 19. 

§ 81. Sir Thomas Mo7 r e — Z47S-1535 . 

Sir Thomas More, Lord Chancellor, and one of the most illus- 
trious Englishmen of his century, was born in Milk street, in the 
City of London, on the 7th of February, 1478. He received the 
rudiments of his education at St. Anthony's School in Thread- 
needle street, at that time under Nicholas Holt, held to be the best 
in the city. He was placed in the household of Cardinal Morton, 
Archbishop of Canterbury. Admission to the Cardinal's family 
was esteemed a high privilege, and was sought as a school of 
manners, and an introduction to the world by the sons of the best 
families in the kingdom. Young Thomas More obtained admis- 
sion through the influence of his father, Sir Thomas, then a rising 
barrister ; and afterwards a justice of the Court of King's Bench. 
The usual prognostication of future distinction is attributed in 
the case of More to Cardinal Morton, who would often tell the 
nobles sitting at the table with him, where young Thomas waited 
on him, that " whosoever liveth to trie it shall see this child prove 
a notable and rare man . ' ' 

At the proper age young Thomas was sent to Oxford, where 



172 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

lie is said vaguely to have had Colet, Grocyn and Linacre for 
his tutors. All that More says is that he had Linacre for 
his master in Greek. Learning Greek was not the matter of 
course which it has since become. Greek was not yet a part 
of the curriculum of the Arts, and to learn it was ill-looked upon 
by the authorities. Those who did so were suspected of an 
inclination towards novel and dangerous ways of thinking, then 
rife on the continent, and slowly finding their way to England. 
More's father, who intended his son to make a career in his own 
profession , took the alarm ; he removed him from the University 
without a degree, and entered him at New Inn to commence at 
once the study of law. The young man had been kept in a state 
of humiliating dependence in money matters, having no allow- 
ance made him, and having to apply to his father for a pair of 
new shoes, when the old ones were worn out. This system was 
pursued by his parents not from niggardliness, but from principle; 
and Thomas More in later years often spoke with approbation of 
this severe discipline, as having been a means of keeping him from 
the vulgar dissipation in which his fellow-students indulged. 
After completing his two years in New Inn, an Inn of Chancery, 
More was admitted in February, 1496, at Lincoln Inn, an Inn of 
the Court, when he was eighteen j^ears old. 

Somewhere, about this period of More's life two things happened 
which gave, in opposite directions, the determining impulse to his 
future career. He was one of those highly susceptible natures, 
which take more readily and more eagerly than common minds 
the impress of that which they encounter in their first contact with 
men. Two principles, forms of thought and feeling, were at this 
date in conflict, rather unconscious than declared on English soil. 
Under the denomination of the " Old Learning " the sentiment 
of the Middle Ages and the idea of Church authority were 
established and in full possession of the learned professions. The 
foe that was advancing in the opposite direction, though without 
the conscience of a hostile purpose, was the new purpose of human 
reason, animated with the revived sentiment of Classicism. In 
More's mind both these hostile influences found an uncongenial 
home. Each had its turn of supremacy, and in his early years it 
had seemed as if the humanistic influence would gain the final 
victory. About the age of twenty he was seized with a violent 
access of devotional rapture. He took a disgust for the world and 
its occupations, and experienced a longing to give himself over to 



SIR THOMAS MORE 173 

an ascetic life. He took a lodging near the Charter House, and 
subjected himself .to the discipline of a Carthusian monk. He 
wore a sharp shirt of hair next to his skin — scourging himself 
every Friday and other fasting days ; lay upon the bare ground 
with a log under his head ; and allowed himself but four or five 
hours of sleep . 

This access of the ascetic malady, however, lasted but a short 
time : More recovered to all appearances his balance of mind. 
But he never entirely emancipated himself from the sentiment 
of devotion, although in later life it exhibited itself in a more 
rational form. Even whilst he was Chancellor, he would take 
part in church services, walking in their processions with a 
surplice. This, however, was at a later period. For the moment 
the balance of his faculties seemed to be restored by a revival 
of the anti-gnostic sentiment of Humanism, which he had imbibed 
from the Oxford circle of friends, and especially from Erasmus. 
The dates as it regards More's early life are uncertain, and we can 
only say that it is possible that the acquaintance with Erasmus' 
might have begun during Erasmus's first visit to England in 
1499. Tradition has dramatized this first meeting into a story, 
that the two happened to sit opposite to each other at the Lord 
Mayor's table ; that they got into an argument during dinner; and 
that in mutual astonishment at each other's wit and readiness 
Erasmus exclaimed : 

Aut tu es Moras, aut Nullus ; 

and the other replied : 

Aut tu es Erasmus, aut Diabolus. 

Rejecting this legend, which has the stamp of fiction upon its face, 
we have certain evidence of acquaintance between the two men in 
a letter of Erasmus, with the date "Oxford," 29th of October, 
1499. Ten years More's senior, and master of the accomplish- 
ments which More was ambitious to acquire, Erasmus could not 
fail to exercise a powerful influence over the brilliant young Eng- 
lishman. More's ingenious demeanor, his quick intelligence and 
winning manners fascinated Erasmus from the first, and acquaint- 
ance ripened rapidly into warm attachment. This contact with 
the Prince of Letters revived in More the spirit of the New Learn- 
ing, and he returned with ardor to the study of Greek, which 
had been begun at Oxford. The humanistic influence was suffici- 
ently strong to save him from wrecking his life in monkish morti- 
fication, and even to keep him for a time on the side of the party 



174 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

of progress. He acquired no inconsiderable facility in trie Greek 
language, from which he made and published some translations. 
His Latin style, though wanting the inimitable ease of Erasmus, 
and often offending the idiom, is yet in copiousness and propriety 
much above the ordinary Latin of English scholars of his time. 

More's attention to the new studies was always subordinate to 
his resolution to rise in his profession , in which he was stimulated 
by his father especially. As early as 1502 he was appointed Under 
Sheriff of the City of London, an office then judicial and of con- 
siderable dignity. He first attracted public attention in the Parlia- 
ment of 1504 by his daring opposition to the King's demand for 
money. Henry VII was entitled, according to the feudal laws, to 
a grant on the occasion of his daughter's marriage. But he came to 
the House of Commons for a much larger sum than he intended 
to give with his daughter. The members, unwilling as they were 
to vote the money, were afraid to offend the King, till the silence 
was broken by More, whose speech is said to have moved the 
House to reduce the subsidy of three -fifteenths, which the govern- 
ment had demanded, to ,£30,000. One of the chamberlains went 
and told his master that he had been thwarted by a beardless boy. 
Henry never forgave the audacity ; but for the present the only 
revenge he could take was upon More's father, whom, upon some 
pretense, he threw into the Tower ; and he only released him on the 
payment of ^100. 

After the accession of Henry VIII, More was called upon to 
take a more active part in public affairs, from 1514^0 1516, on 
business of considerable importance. In 15 16 he was made a 
Privy Councilor, and received from Henry marks of the greatest 
favor. About this time he composed his History of Richard the 
Third and his Utopia. The Utopia is written in very good Latin, 
and was published first in Louvain in 15 16, and afterwards in Basil 
in 15 18. In 15 19 he resigned the ofhce of Under-Sheriff, and in 
1 52 1, he was knighted and made treasurer of the Exchequer, 
finding time amidst his increasing duties to attack Luther's Ninety- 
Five Theses against Indulgence. In the Parliament which met in 
1523 More was chosen Speaker, and in the discharge of his duties 
he offended Cardinal Wolsey. Henry, however, continued to 
show the greatest marks of favor to More, and appointed him, 
in 1525, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. On the downfall of 
Wolsey, More was made chancellor, on the 25th of October, 1529. 

Unfortunately for More a Lord Chancellor is not merely a judge, 



SIR THOMAS MORK 175 

but has high political functions to perform. In raising More to 
that eminent position the king had not only considered his pro- 
fessional distinction, but had counted on his avowed liberal and 
reforming tendencies. In the Utopia he had spoken against the 
vices and declared for indifference of religious creed, with a 
breadth of philosophical view, of which there was then no other 
example in any Englishman of that age. At the same time, as he 
could not be suspected of any sympathy with Lutheran or Wicklif- 
fite heresies, he might be fairly regarded as qualified to lead the 
party which aimed at reform in State and Church, within the limits 
of Catholic orthodoxy. But in the king's mind the public ques- 
tions of reform were entirely sunk in the personal one of the 
divorce. The divorce was a point on which Sir Thomas would 
not yield. And as he saw that the marriage with Anne Boleyh 
was determined upon, he petitioned the king* to be allowed to 
resign the Great Seal, alleging as the cause his want of health. 
With much reluctance the resignation was accepted on the ioth 
of May, 1532, with many gracious expressions of good will on the 
part of the king. The promise held out for future bounty was 
never fulfilled, and More left office, as he had entered it, a poor 
man. His necessitous condition was so notorious that the clergy, 
on convocation, voted him a present of ,£5,000. This he 
peremptorily refused, either for himself or his family, declaring 
that he would rather see it all cast into the Thames. Yet the 
whole of his income, after resigning his office, did not exceed ^100 
a year. 

Hitherto he had maintained a large establishment, not on the 
princely scale of Wolsey, but on the patriarchal fashion of having 
all his sons-in-law with their families under his roof. When he 
resigned the Chancellorship, he called his children and his grand- 
children together to explain his reduced circumstances. 

' ' If we wish to live together, ' ' said he, " you must content to be 
contributories together. But my counsel is, that we fall not to the 
lowest fare first ; we will not, therefore, descend to Oxford fare, 
nor to the fare of the New Inn, but we will begin with Lincoln's 
Inn first, where many right worshipful men of great account and 
good years do live full well ; which, if we find ourselves the first 
year not able to maintain, then we will the next year come down 
to Oxford fare, where many great, learned, and ancient fathers 
and doctors are conversant ; which, if our purses stretch not to 
maintain, then may we afterwards with bag and wallet go a beg- 



176 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

ging together, hoping that for pity some good folks will give us 
their charity." 

More was now able, as he writes to Erasmus, to return to the life 
which had always been his ambition, when free from business and 
public affairs, he might give himself up to his favorite studies, and 
to the practice of devotion. Of the Chelsea interior Erasmus has 
drawn a charming picture, which may vie with Holbein's celebrated 
canvas, The Household of Sir Thomas More. This is the picture. 

" More has built near London, upon the Thames, a modest but 
commodious mansion . There he lives surrounded by his numerous 
family, including his wife, his three daughters and their husbands, 
with eleven grandchildren. There is not any man living so 
affectionate to his children, and he loveth his old wife as if she 
were a girl of fifteen. Such is the excellence of his disposition, 
that whatever happeneth that could not be helped, he is cheerful, 
and as well pleased as though the best thing had been done. In 
More's house you would say that Plato's Academy was revived 
again : only, whereas, in the Academy, the discussions turned upon 
geometry and the power of numbers, the house at Chelsea is a 
veritable school of the Christian religion. In it is no man or 
woman but readeth or studieth the liberal arts; yet is their chiei 
care of piety. There is never seen any idle : the head of the house 
governs it by a lofty carriage, not by rebukes, but by gentleness 
and amiable manners. Every member is busy in his place, per- 
forming his duty with alacrity; nor is sober mirth wanting." 

But More was too conspicious to be long allowed to enjoy the 
happiness of a retired life. A special invitation was sent to him 
by the King to attend the coronation of Anne Boleyn, accompanied 
with the gracious offer of £20, to buy a new suit for the occasion. 
More refused to attend, and from that moment he was marked out 
for vengeance. Various charges were brought against him for 
receiving bribes in the administration of justice, and for high trea- 
son, none of which, of course, could be sustained. When the 
charge of treason proved too ridiculous to be proceeded with, 
More's name was struck off of the bill of attainder. When his 
daughter brought him the news of this More calmly said : "T' 

faith, Meg, 

Ouod defertur non aufertur ; ' ' 

that which is postponed is not dropped. At another time, having 
asked his daughter how the court went, and how Queen Anne 
did, he received for answer: 



THE TUDORS — CATHARINE OF ARAGON 177 

"Never did better. There is nothing else than dancing and 
sporting." 

To this More answered : 

"Alas, it pitieth me to remember unto what misery of soul she 
will shortly come, poor soul ; these dances of hers will prove such 
dances as will dance our heads off like footballs ; but it will not 
be long ere her head will dance the like dance . ' ' 

By a law passed in the session of 1 533-1 534 it was made high 
treason, by writing, printing, deed or act, to do anything to the pre- 
judice, and so forth, of the king's lawful matrimony with Queen 
Anne ; and it was also provided that all persons should take an 
oath to maintain the whole contents of the statute. At the end 
of the session commissioners were appointed to administer the 
oath, and on April 15th, 1534, More was summoned before them 
to take it. He declined to take the oath, was committed to the 
Tower, and beheaded on the 6th of July, 1535. 

§ 82. The Tudor s. 
Henry VII, from 1485 to 1509. 
Henry VIII, from 1509 to 1547. 
Edward VI, from 1547 to 1553. 
Mary, from 1553 to 1559. 
Elizabeth, from 1559 to 1603. 

§83. Catharine of Ar agon. 

The first queen of Henry VIII, and the youngest daughter of 
Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, was born on the 15th of Decern 1 
ber, 1485, whilst her mother was on her way to Toledo from ^ the 
Spanish army, then engaged in the conquest of Granada. The 
first four years of her life were passed in the camp before Granada : 
after the taking of the city it became the capital and residence of 
the Court. Here then Catharine spent her youth, carefully 
educated by her mother, herself a woman of no common learning 
and ability, during a period of marvellous prosperity for Spain. 
While the Moors were being finally conquered America was dis- 
covered, and the Spanish chivalry was in its very bloom. In 1501 , 
being requested in marriage by Henry VII for his eldest son Ar- 
thur, Catharine embarked from Spain, landed at Plymouth on the 
2d of October ; and with the usual pageantry was united to Arthur 
the month following. 

Their marriage life was not of long duration: in April of 
13 



178 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

the following year, Arthur died. His widow continued to reside 
in England, as proposals were made and accepted for her betrothal 
to Henry, the second son of Henry VII, now heir-presumptive to 
the throne. Catharine, already eighteen, was disinclined to an 
engagement with a boy of thirteen. Nevertheless the ceremony 
of betrothal came off in 1503. The marriage rite itself did not take 
place till 1509, after the accession of Henry to the throne, a 
dispensation from the Pope having been obtained. The early 
years of the marriage were happy enough . Henry was a handsome, 
affable and jovial king, fond of magnificent display, covetous of 
distinction on the tilting ground, and ambitious of popularity. 
His wife had the good sense to humor him in his favorite diver- 
sions ; while she herself lived a dignified, self-denying life of almost 
conventional strictness, conscientious in the performance of her 
religious duties, devoted to her husband, kind to her friends, 
charitable to her enemies, and careful of the interests of her 
adopted country. In the year of Flodden, in 15 13, she was Regent 
of the kingdom during the absence of Henry in France, and 
performed the duties of that office with great courage and ability. 
But the repeated loss of children cast a gloom over those years. 
Three sons died almost as soon as they were born: Mary, a sickly 
child, was the only survivor. 

It was not until 1527 that Henry's scruples regarding the 
validity of the marriage with Catharine became public, though 
there can be no doubt his affections had been alienated from her 
long before. It was anticipated by Henry, and Clement the Pope, 
that the conventicle habits of Catharine would have rendered it 
easy for her to retire from the throne, and spend the rest of her 
life in a monastery. But they were mistaken; however submis- 
sive she might be to her husband in everything else, and however 
ready towards the minor irregularities of his conduct, she was 
resolved not to allow any doubt to be cast on the legality of their 
marriage or the title to the throne of her daughter Mary, nor to 
surrender any of her rights as queen. This the Papal Legate 
Campeggio soon found out on his arrival in England in 1528. 

After long hesitation and much torturous diplomatic manceuver- 
ing on the side of the Pope, a court, consisting of Legates Cam- 
peggio and Wolsey, was at last constituted on the 28th of May, 
1529, at Blackfriars, to hear the case of the royal parties. Catharine 
appeared only to protest against the legality of the court, and 
after a solemn address to the king for justice, appealed to the Pope 



CARDINAL WOIvSEY 179 

and withdrew. Notwithstanding the proceeding for the divorce, 
and the fact that Henry had brought Anne Boleyn to live in the 
palace, Catharine and he were not quite separated till the begin- 
ning of 1 53 1, when, finding he could not prevail upon her to 
withdraw her appeal to the Pope, or in any way to give up her 
passive resistance, he commanded her to retire from Windsor. 
After that she never saw him again, nor her daughter Mary. Her 
residence was often exchanged, but it was principally at Ampthill. 
At length, an open declaration from the Pope against Henry 
obliged the monarch to solve the difficulty by the assertion of the 
Royal Supremacy in 1531 . In a court held at Dunstable, Cranmer, 
recently appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, pronounced the 
marriage of Henry and Catharine null and void, in 1533. Naturally, 
Catharine, although as charitably disposed as ever towards Henry, 
treated this and all other attempts to deprive her of her rights 
with resolute contempt. Her health, which had begun to fail 
long before the divorce was agitated, now completely gave way. 
After writing a letter of forgiveness and gentle admonition to her 
husband, and taking all the care she could of her faithful attend- 
ants, she died at Kimbolton Castle the 7th of January, 1536. 

§ 84. Cardinal Wolsey . — 14.JI-1530. 

' ' There are many things in the Commonwealth of No Where 
that I rather wish than I hope to see embodied in our own. ' ' It was 
was with these words of characteristic irony that Sir Thomas More 
closed the first work which embodied the New Learning. Destined 
as they were to fulfilment in the course of ages, its schemes of 
social, religious, and political reform broke in fact helplessly 
against the temper of the times. At the moment when More was 
pleading the cause of justice between the rich and the poor, social 
discontent was being fanned by new exactions and sterner laws 
into a fiercer flame. While he was advocating toleration and 
Christian comprehension, Christendom stood on the verge of a 
religious strife, which threatened to rend it forever into pieces. 
While he aimed sarcasm after sarcasm at king-worship, the new 
despotism of monarchy was being organized into a vast and all- 
embracing system by the genius of Lord High Chancellor Thomas 
Wolsey. Wolsey was the son of a wealthy butcher, grazier or wool 
merchant of Ipswich, His ability raised him into notice at the 
close of the preceding reign, and he had been taken by Bishop Fox 
into the service of the crown . The activity which he showed in 



180 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

organizing the royal army for the campaign in 15 13 won for him a 
foremost place in the confidence of Henry the Eighth. The young 
king lavished dignities upon him with a profusion that marked the 
completeness of his trust. From the post of Royal Almoner he 
was advanced in 15 13 to the See of Tournay. At the opening of 
15 14 he became Bishop of Lincoln, and at its close he was tran- 
slated to the Archbishopric of York . In 1 5 1 5 Henry procured 
from Rome his elevation to the office of Cardinal and raised him 
to the post of Chancellor. 

A Cardinal is a dignitary of the Roman Church next in rank to 
the Pope. The Cardinals have the title of " Eminence," and are 
distinguished by a scarlet hat, and a short purple mantle. They 
are the electors of the Pope, who is chosen from among them, and 
they form his Council, which consists of seventy men, of whom 
six are bishops, fifty presbyters, and fourteen deacons. 

The Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain, or Keeper of the 
Great Seal, is the highest office of the Crown. He is a privy 
counsellor by his office and prolocutor of the House of Lords by 
prescription : visitor of all hospitals and colleges founded by the 
king; guardian of all charitable uses; and judge of the High 
Court of Chancery. 

So great a rise of Wolsey stirred up envy in the men about him, 
and his rivals noted bitterly the songs, the dances, and carnivals, 
which had won, as they supposed, the favor of the king. But 
sensuous and worldly as was Wolsey 's temper, his powers lifted 
him above the level of a court favorite. His noble bearing, his 
varied ability, his enormous capacity for toil, the natural breadth 
and grandeur of his mind, marked him out naturally as the min 1 - 
ister of a king, who showed throughout his reign a keen eye for a 
greatness in the men about him. 

Wolsey 's mind was European rather than English: it dwelt 
little on home affairs, but turned almost exclusively to the general 
politics of the European powers, and of England as one of them. 
Whatever might be Henry's disappointment in the issue of his 
French campaign, the young king might dwell with justifiable 
pride in the general result of his foreign policy. This, however, 
we cannot follow out, as it would introduce us too much into the 
general history of the European nations for the time, and lead us 
from our proper subject. 

Suffice it to sa}^, that, at the close of the year 15 18, the policy 
of Wolsey seemed justified by success. He had found England a 



THE DIVORCE AND WOESEY'S FAEE 181 

power of the second order, overawed by France, and dictated to 
by Ferdinand of Spain. She now stood in the foremost of 
European affairs, as a state whose alliance was desired alike by 
French King and Spanish King, and dealt on equal terms with 
Emperor or Pope. In European cabinets, Wolsey was regarded as 
hardly less a power to be conciliated than his royal master. Both 
Charles and Francis sought his friendship, and in the years that 
follow, his official resources were swelled by pensions from both 
princes. At home the king loaded him with new proofs of his favor. 
The revenues of two sees, whose tenants were foreigners, fell into 
his hands ; he held the Bishopric of Winchester and the Abbacy 
of St. Albins. He spent this vast wealth with princely ostenta- 
tion. His pomp was almost royal. A train of prelates and 
nobles followed him as he moved ; his household was composed 
of five hundred persons of noble birth ; and in it the chief posts 
were occupied by knights and barons of the realm. Two of his 
houses, Hampton Court, and York House, the later White Hall, 
were splendid enough to serve at his fall as royal palaces. 

Nor was this magnificence a mere show of power. The whole 
direction of home and foreign affairs rested with Wolsey alone. 
His toil was ceaseless. The morning for the most part was given 
to his business as Chancellor in Westminster Hall and at the Star 
Chamber; but nightfall still found him laboring at exchequer 
business or home administration, managing Church affairs, or 
unravelling the mismanagement of Irish misgovernment, planning 
schools and colleges, above all drawing and studying dispatches, 
or transacting the whole diplomatic correspondence of the State. 
Greedy as was his passion for toil, Wolsey felt the pressure of this 
enormous mass of business; and his imperious tones, his angry 
outcry of impatience showed him to be overworked. Even his 
vigorous frame gave way. Still a strong and handsome man in 
15 18, at the age of forty-seven, Wolsey was already an old man, 
broken by disease, when he fell from power at fifty-five. But 
enormous as was the mass of work he undertook, it was thoroughly 
done. 

§ 85. The Divorce and Wolsey 's Fall. 

No sovereign stood higher in the favor of Rome than Henry, 
whose alliance had ever been ready in its distress, and who was 
even now prompt with aid in money. But Clement's consent to 
his wish to be divorced from Catharine meant a break with the 
Emperor of Germany, Charles V, Catharine's nephew ; and the 



182 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

exhaustion of France, the weakness of the league, in which the 
lesser strove to maintain their; independence against Charles after 
the battle of Pa via, left the Pope at the Emperor's mercy. Whilst 
the English envoy was mooting the question of divorce in 1526, 
the surprise of Rome by an imperial force brought home to 
Clement his utter helplessness. From this point Wolsey's inter- 
vention is clear. As Legate he took cognizance of all matrimonial 
causes, and in May, 1527, a collusive action was brought in his 
court against Henry for cohabiting with his brother's wife. The 
King appeared by proctor, but the suit was suddenly dropped. 
Secret as had been the proceedings they reached Catharine's ear, 
and as she refused to admit the facts on which Henry rested his 
case, her appeal would have carried the matter to the tribunal of 
the Pope, and Clement's decision would hardly have been a favor- 
able one. 

The Pope, however, was now not in a favorable or possible con- 
dition to pronounce any such decision. At the very moment of 
the suit, Rome was stormed and sacked by the army of the Duke 
of Bourbon. Clement was virtually a prisoner in the Castle of 
Saint Angelo, and it was impossible for him to fulfill freely the 
functions of a Pope. Wolsey proposed, in conjunction with 
Francis, King of France, to call a meeting of the College of 
Cardinals at Avignon, which should exercise the papal powers 
till Clement's liberation. As Wolsey was to preside over this 
assembly, it would be easy to win from it a favorable answer to 
Henry's request. 

But Clement had no mind to surrender his power, and secret 
orders from the Pope prevented the Italian Cardinal from attend- 
ing such an assembly. Nor was Wolsey more fortunate in another 
plan for bringing about the same end, by inducing Clement to dele- 
gate to him his full power westward of the Alps. Henry's trust in 
him was fast waning before these failures, and the steady pressure 
of his rivals at court, and the coldness of the king on his return in 
September was an omen of his minister's fall. After various 
dilly- dairyings on both sides, Clement at last consented to a 
Legatine commission for the trial of the case in England. In 
this commission Cardinal Campeggio, who was looked upon as a 
partisan of the English king, was joined with Wolsey. 

Great as the concession seemed, the gleam of success failed to 
hide from the minister the dangers surrounding him. The great 
nobles, whom he had practically shut out from the king's 



THE DIVORCE AND WOLSEY 'S PALL 183 

counsels, were longing for his fall. The Boleyns and the young 
courtiers looked on him as cool in Anne's cause. He was hated 
alike by many of the old doctrines as well as of the new. The 
clergy never forgave his extortion ; the monks saw him suppress- 
ing the small monasteries. The foundation of Cardinal College 
failed to reconcile to him the scholars of the New Learning. 
Their poet Skelton was among his bitterest assailants. The Pro- 
testants, goaded by the persecutions of this very year, hated him with 
deadly hatred. His French alliances, his declaration of war with a 
the Emperor, hindered the trade with Flanders, and secured the 
hostility of the merchant class. 

The country at large galled with murrain and famine and panic, 
struck by an outbreak of the ' ' sweating sickness, ' ' which carried off 
two thousand in London alone, laid all its sufferings at the door 
of the Cardinal. And now that Henry's mood itself became 
uncertain, Wolsey knew his hour had come. Henry had indeed 
seized upon the grant of the commission, as if the matter were at an 
end. Anne Boleyn was installed in the royal palaces and honored 
with the state of a wife. The new delegate, Campeggio. held the 
bishopric of Salisbury, and had been asked for as a judge from 
the belief that he would favor the king's cause. But he bore 
secret instructions from the Pope to bring about, if possible, a 
reconciliation between Henry and the Queen ; and in no case to 
pronounce sentence without reference to Rome. His slowness 
presaged ill : he did not reach England till the end of September, 
and a month was wasted in vain efforts to bring Henry to a recon- 
ciliation or Catharine to retirement into a monastery. The hear- 
ing of the case was delayed through the winter, and the long delay 
told fatally on Wolsey 's fortunes. Even Clement blamed him for 
having hindered Henry from judging the matter in his own realm, 
and marrying on the sentence of his own courts ; and the Boleyns 
looked upon his policy as dictated by hatred to Anne. The King 
and Minister still clung, indeed passionately, to their hopes from 
Rome. 

But in 1529, Charles of Germany met their pressure by a pressure 
of his own, and the progress of his arms decided Clement to revoke 
the cause to Rome. Wolsey could only hope to anticipate this 
decision by pushing the trial hastily forward, and at the end of May, 
the two legates opened their court in the great hall of the Black- 
friars. King and Queen were cited to appear before them, when 
the court adjourned to meet again on the 18th of June. The trial 



184 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

proceeded, and on the 23d of July the court assembled to pro- 
nounce the sentence. Henry's hopes were at the highest, when 
they were suddenly crushed to the ground. At the opening of the 
proceedings, Campeggio rose to declare the court adjourned to the 
following October. 

The adjournment was a mere evasion. The presence of the 
Imperialists had at last forced Clement to summon the cause to 
his own tribunal at Rome ; and the jurisdiction of the legates was 
at an end. Through the twenty years of his reign Henry had 
known nothing of opposition to his will or wishes. Although the 
commission was his own device, his pride must have been sorely 
galled, with his imperious temper, by the summons to the court of 
the legates, all through the weary negotiations, the subterfuges, 
and perfidy of the Pope. The warmest adherents of the old faith 
revolted against the degradation of the crown . " It was the strangest 
and newest sight," says Cavendish, "that ever we have read or 
heard of in any history or chronicle, in any region, that a King 
and a Queen should be con vented, and constrained by process 
compellatory, to appear in any court as common persons without 
their own realm and dominions, to abide the judgment and decree 
of their own subjects, they having the royal diadem and preroga- 
tives thereof." 

Even this degradation had been born in vain. Foreign and 
papal tribunal as that of the legates really was, it lay within 
Henry's kingdom, and had the air of an English court. But the 
citation to Rome was a citation to the King to plead in a court with- 
out his realm. Wolsey had himself warned Clement of the hope- 
lessness of expecting Henry to submit to such a humiliation as this . 
"If the king be cited to appear in person or by proxy, and his 
prerogatives be interfered with, none of his subjects will tolerate 
the insult. To cite the King to Rome, to threaten him with 
excommunication, is no more tolerable than to deprive him of his 
royal dignity. If he were to appear in Italy, it would be at the 
head of -a formidable army." 

But Clement had been dead to the warning, and the case had 
been evoked out of the realm. Henry's wrath fell at once upon 
Wolsey. Whatever furtherance or hinderance had been given to 
his re-marriage, it was Wolsey who had dissuaded him from act- 
ing at the first independently — from conducting the case in his 
own courts and acting on the sentence of his own judges. Whether 
to secure a succession by a more independent decision or to pre- 



THE DIVORCE AND WOESEY'S FAEE 185 

serve uninjured the prerogatives of the Papal See, it was Wolsey 
who had counselled him to seek a divorce from Rome : he 
promised him success in his suit, and in this Wolsey had stood 
alone. Even Clement had counselled him to carry out his original 
purpose when it was too late. All that the Pope sought now was 
to be freed from the necessity of meddling in the matter at all. It 
was Wolsey that had forced papal intervention on him, as he had 
forced it on Henry, and the failure of his plan was fatal to him. 
From the close of the Legatine Court Henry would see him 
no more, and his favorite Stephen Gardiner, who had become 
Chief Secretary of State, succeeded him in the King's confidence. 
If Wolsey remained Minister for a while, it was because the thread 
of complex foreign negotiations, which he was conducting, could 
not be roughly broken. In October, on the very day the Car- 
dinal took his place, with a haughty countenance and all his 
former pomp in the Court of Chancery, an indictment was pre- 
ferred against him by the King's attorney for receiving Bulls from 
Rome in violation of the Statute of Provisors. A few days later 
he was deprived of the seals. Wolsey was prostrated by the blow. 
In a series of abject appeals he offered to give up everything that 
he possessed, if the King would cease from his displeasure. For 
the moment Henry seemed contented with his disgrace. But a 
thousand boats full of Londoners covered the Thames to see the 
Cardinal's barge pass to the Tower, but he was permitted to re- 
turn to Esher. Although judgment of forfeiture and imprison- 
ment was given against him on the King's Bench at the close of 
October, on the following February he received a pardon on 
surrender of his vast possessions to the Crown , and was permitted 
to withdraw to his Diocese of York, the one dignity he had been 
supposed to retain. Thus Shakespeare, no doubt, expressed his 
feelings at the time : 

Farewell, a long farewell to all my greatness ! 
This is the state of man : to-day he pnts forth 
The tender leaves of hopes, to-morrow blossoms, 
And bears his blushing honors thick upon him : 
The third day comes a frost, a killing frost : 
And — when he thinks, good easy man, full surely 
His greatness is ripening — nips his roots 
And then he falls, as I do. I have ventured, 
Eike little wanton boys, that swim on bladders, 
This many summers in the sea of glory ; 
But far beyond my depth : my high-blown pride 
At length broke under me ; and now has left me 



186 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Weary, and old with service, to the mercy 
Of a rude stream, that must forever hide me. 
Vain pomp and glory of this world, I hate ye : 
I feel my heart new-opened. 0, how wretched 
Is that poor man that hangs on princes' favors ! 
There is, betwixt that smile we would aspire to, 
That sweet aspect of princes, and their ruin 
More pangs and fears than men or women have ; 
And when he falls, he falls like Lucifer, 

Never to hope again 

Mark but my fall, and that ruined me. 

Cromwell, I charge thee, fling aw 7 ay ambition : 

By that sin fell the angels ; how can man then, 

The image of his Maker, hope to win by 't? 

Love thyself last : cherish those hearty that hate thee ; 

Corruption wins not more than honesty. 

Still in thy right hand carry gentle peace, 

To silence envious tongues. Be just and fear not : 

Let all the ends thou aim'st at be thy Country's, 

Thy God's and Truth's: then if thou fall'st, O Cromwell, 

Thou fall'st a blessed Martyr. Serve the King 

And my integrity to Heaven 

I dare now call mine own. O Cromwell, Cromwell, Cromwell,. 

Had I but served my God with half the zeal 

I served the King, He would not in mine age 

Have left me naked to mine enemies. 

§ 86. Luther. 

Whilst Charles and Francis were struggling for the lordship of 
the world, Germany had been shaken by the outbursts of the 
Reformation. "That Luther has a fine genius," laughed Leo the 
Tenth, when he heard in 15 17 that a German professor had nailed 
some propositions denouncing the abuse of Indulgences, or of the 
papal power to permit certain penalties attached to the commission 
of sins, against the doors of a church at Wittenberg. But the 
" Quarrel of Friars," as the controversy was termed contemptu- 
ously at Rome, soon took larger proportions. If at the outset 
Luther " flung himself prostrate at the feet of the Papacy and. 
owned its voice as the voice of Christ," the sentence of Leo no 
sooner confirmed the doctrine of Indulgences than their opponent 
appealed to a future council of the Church. 

In 1520 the rupture was complete. A papal bull formally con- 
demned the errors of the Reformer, and Luther formally consigned 
the bull to the flames . A second condemnation expelled him from 
the Church, and the ban of the Empire was soon added to that ot 
the Papacy. 



LUTHER 187 

Charles the Fifth had bought Leo's alliance with himself and 
England by a promise of repressing the new heresy, and its author 
was called to appear before him in the Diet at Worms. ' ' Here stand 
I : I can none other," Luther replied to the young Emperor as he 
pressed him to recant. From a hiding place in the Thuringian 
Forest, where he was sheltered by the Elector of Saxony after his 
condemnation, he denounced not merely, as at first, the abuses of 
the Papacy, but the Papacy itself. The heresies of Wickliffe were 
revived ; the infallibility of the authority of the Roman See, the 
truth of its doctrines, the efficiency of its worship, were denied 
and scoffed at in vigorous pamphlets which he issued from his 
retreat, which were dispersed throughout the world by the new 
printing press. Germany welcomed them with enthusiasm. The 
old resentment against the oppression of Rome; the moral revolt 
in the minds of men against the secularity and corruption of the 
Church ; and the disgust of the New Learning at the superstition 
which the Papacy now formally protected, combined to secure 
for Luther a wider-spread popularity, and the protection of the 
Northern Princes of the Empire. 

In England his protest seemed at first to find no echo. The king 
himself was, both on political and religious grounds, firm on the 
papal side. England and Rome were drawn to a close alliance 
by the identity of their political position. Each was hard-pressed 
between the same great powers : Rome had to hold its own between 
the masters of Southern and the masters of Northern Italy, as 
England had to hold her own between the rulers of France and 
the Netherlands. From the outset of his reign to the actual break 
with Clement the Seventh, the policy of Henry was always at one 
with the Papacy. Nor were the king's religious tendencies hostile 
to it. He was a trained theologian, and proud of his theological 
knowledge, but to the end his convictions remained firmly on the 
side of the doctrine that Luther denied. In 152 1, therefore, he 
entered the list against Luther with an l ' Assertion of the Seven 
Sacraments," for which he was rewarded by Leo with the title of 
" Defender of the Faith." 

The insolent abuse of the Reformer's answer called More and 
Fisher into the field. The influence of the New Learning was now 
strong at the English Court. Colet and Grocyn were among the 
foremost preachers ; Lin acre was Henry's physician ; More was a 
Privy Councillor; Pace was one of the Secretaries of State; 
Trustall was Master of the Rolls. And as yet the New Learning, 



188 



ENGLISH LITERATURE 



though scared by Luther's intemperate language, had steadily 
backed him in his struggle. Erasmus pleaded for him with the 
Emperor. Ulrich von Hutten attacked the Friars in satires and 
invectives as violent as his own. 

But the temper of the Renaissance was even more antagonistic 
to the temper of Luther than that of Rome itself. From the golden 
dream of a new age wrought peaceably and purely by the slow 
process of intelligence, the growth of letters, the development of 
human virtue, the Reformer at Wittenberg turned away with horror. 
He had little or no sympathy with the new culture. He despised 
reason as heartily as any papal dogmatist could despise it. He 
hated the very thought of toleration or comprehension. He had 
been driven by a moral and intellectual compulsion to declare the 
Roman system a false one ; but it was only to replace it by another 
system of doctrine as elaborate, and proclaiming the same infalli- 
bility. To degrade human nature was to attack the very base of 
the New Learning, and his attack on it called the foremost of its 
leaders into the field. But Erasmus no sooner advanced to its 
defense than Luther declared man to be utterly enslaved by 
original sin, and incapable through any efforts of his own of dis- 
covering truth or arriving at goodness. 

Such a doctrine not only annihilated the piety and wisdom of 
the classic past, from which the New Learning had drawn its larger 
views of life and of the world : it trampled to the dust reason 
itself, the very instrument by which More and Erasmus hoped to 
regenerate both knowledge and religion. To More especially, 
with his keener perceptions of its future effects, this sudden revival 
of a purely theological and dogmatic spirit, severing Christendom 
into warring camps and ruining all hopes of union, tolerance was 
especially hateful. The temper, which had hitherto appeared so 
endearing, gentle and happy, suddenly gave way. His reply to 
Luther's attack upon the King sank to the level of the work it 
answered ; and although that of Bishop Fisher was calmer and 
more argumentive, the divorce of the New Learning from the 
Reformation was complete. 

But, if the world of scholars and thinkers stood aloof from the 
new movement, it found a warmer welcome in the larger world, 
where men are stirred rather by emotion than by thought. There 
was an England, of which More and Colet knew little or nothing, 
in which Luther's words kindled a fire that was never to die. As 
a great social and political movement Lollardry had ceased to 



WILLIAM TYNDALK 189 

exist and little remained of the directly religious impulse given 
by Wickliffe, beyond the vague restlessness and discontent with 
the system of the Church. But weak and fitful as was the life of 
Lollardry, prosecutions, whose records lie scattered over the 
bishops' registers, failed wholly to kill it. We see groups, meeting 
here and there, to read "in a great book of heresy all one night, 
chapters of the Evangelists in English;" while transcripts of 
Wickliffe 's tracts passed from hand to hand. 

§ 87. William- Tyndale — 1484-1536. 

The smouldering emblems needed but a breath to fan them into 
a flame, and the breath came from William Tyndale. Born among 
the Cotwold Hills where Bosworth Fieldgave England to the 
Tudors, Tyndale passed from Oxford to Cambridge, to feel the 
full impulse given by the appearance of the New Testament of 
Erasmus. 

From that moment one thought was in his heart. He per- 
ceived by experience now that it was impossible to establish the 
people in any truth, unless the Scripture was plainly laid before 
their eyes in their mother tongue. "If God spare my life, "he 
said to a learned controversialist, "ere many years I will cause 
a boy that driveth the plow shall know more of the Scripture than 
than thou dost." But he was a man of forty before his dream 
became a fact. Drawn from his retirement in Gloucestershire by 
the news of Iyuther's protest at Wittenberg, he found shelter for 
a year with a London alderman, Humfrey Monmouth. "He 
studied most part of the day at his books," said his host after- 
wards, ' ' and would eat but sodden meat and drink but small single 
beer." The book which he studied was the Bible. 

But it was soon necessary for him to quit England if his pur- 
pose was to hold. "I understand at the last not only that there 
was no room in my lord of London's palace to translate the New 
Testament, but also that there was no place to do it in all Eng- 
land." Thus he expressed himself. From Hamburg, where he 
took refuge in 1524, he probably soon found his way to the little 
town of Wittenberg, which had suddenly become the sacred city 
of the Reformation. Students of all nations were flocking there 
with an enthusiasm that resembled that of the Crusades. "As 
they came in sight of the town," a contemporary tells us, "they 
returned thanks to God with clasped hands, for from Wittenberg, 
as heretofore from Jerusalem, the light of truth had spread to the 
utmost parts of the earth." 



190 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Such a visit could only force Tyndale to face the "poverty, 
exile, bitter absence from friends, hunger and thirst and cold, 
great dangers, and innumerable other hard and sharp fightings ' ' to 
which he had set himself, which it was to bring with it. In 1525 
his version of the New Testament was completed, and means were 
furnished by English merchants for printing it at Koln — or Cologne. 
But Tyndale had soon to fly with his sheets to Worms, a city 
whose Lutheran tendencies made it a safe refuge, and it was from 
Worms that six thousand copies of the New Testament were sent 
in 1 5 2 6 to English shores . The king was keenly opposed to a book , 
which he looked on as made ' ' at the solicitation and instigation 
of Luther," and even the men of the New Learning, from whom 
it might have hoped for welcome, were estranged from it by its 
Lutheran origin. 

The English government succeeded at length in inducing the 
authorities of Brussels to arrest and imprison the translator, and 
finally to put him to death. He was burnt at the stake at Tilford, 
near Brussels, in 1536, his dying exclamation being, "Lord, open 
Thou the King of England's eyes." 

§ 88. English Translations of the Bible. 
Tyndale and Coverdale, the former of whom was burned as 
already said in 1536; and the latter made Bishop of Exeter, about 
the middle of the same century, gave to the world the first portions ; 
and the two together, the whole of the sacred writings in an 
English version ; and the compilation of the English Book of Com- 
mon Prayer, in the reign of Edward the Sixth, combined with the 
diffusion of the English language, to furnish the people with 
models of the finest possible style, grave and dignified, without 
ostentation, vigorous and intelligible, and without vulgarity. The 
Liturgy itself was little else but a translation, with some few 
omissions and alterations from the Latin mass-book of the Roman 
Church; but the simple and majestic style of the version, as well 
as that preserved in the English translation of the Bible, has 
endowed the Anglican Church with the noblest religious diction, 
possessed by any nation in the world. It was formed at the critical 
period in the history of the English tongue, when the simplicity 
of the ancient speech was still fresh and living ; and yet when 
the progress of civilization was sufficiently advanced, to adorn that 
ancient element with the riches and expressiveness of a more 
polished epoch. 






ARCHBISHOP CRANMER 191 

The singular felicity of these circumstances has had an incal- 
culable effect on the whole character of the English language and 
literature ; and has preserved to the tongue the force and pic- 
turesqueness of the fifteenth century, whilst not excluding the 
refinement of the nineteenth. Nor is it possible that the majestic 
force of the older English writers can ever become obsolete in 
England, while the noble and massive language of the Bible and 
Prayer Book continues to exert, as it ever will, so immense an 
influence on the modes of thinking and speaking of all classes of 
the population. Many of the ancient preachers and contro- 
versalists, too, like good old Latimer, burned at the stake by 
Maty in 1555, and the Chronicler of the Protestant Martyrs, John 
Foxe, who died in 1587, contributed in writings, which though 
sometimes rude and unadorned, to disseminate among the great 
mass of the people, not only an ardent attachment to Protestant 
doctrines, but a habit of religious discussion and consequently a 
tendency to intellectual activity. 

§ 89. Archbishop Grannie?' — 14.89-1556. 

From the autumn of 1529 are to be dated the fall of Wolsey 
and the rise of Cranmer. The death of the great Cardinal took 
place on the 29th of November, 1530. In January following the 
first blow was struck at the Church, by an indictment brought 
into the King's Bench against all the Clergy of the Kingdom, for 
supporting Wolsey in the exercise of his Eegatine power, without 
the royal license ; and it was an act passed immediately afterwards 
by the Convocation of the Province of Canterbury for granting to 
the king a sum of money to exempt them from the punishment of 
conviction on this indictment, that the first movement was made 
towards a revolt against the See of Rome, by the title given to 
Henry of the " One Protector of the English Church, its only and 
supreme lord, and as far as might be, by the law of Christ, its 
Supreme Head . ' ' 

Shortly afterwards the Convocation declared the King's marriage 
with Catharine to be contrary to the law of God. In August, 1537, 
Cranmer was appointed to the Archbishopric of Canterbury. In 
the beginning of the year 1533 Henry was privately married to 
Anne Boleyn; and on the 23rd of May following, Archbishop 
Cranmer pronounced the former marriage with Catharine void. 
In the meanwhile the Parliament had passed a law forbidding all 
appeals to the Church of Rome. Pope Clement VII met this by 



192 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

annulling the sentence of Cranmerin the matter of the marriage, 
on which the separation from Rome became complete. Acts were 
passed by the Parliament the next year, declaring that the clergy 
should in the future be assembled in Convocation only by the 
king's writ; that no constitutions enacted by them should be of 
force without the king's grant ; and that no first-fruits or Peter's 
pence, or money for dispensations, should any longer be paid to the 
Pope. In the next session, which reassembled in the end of this 
same year, acts were passed declaring the king's highness to be 
the supreme head of the Church . After this various persons were 
executed for refusing to acknowledge the king's supremacy ; 
among others, the two illustrious victims, Fisher, Bishop of 
Rochester, and the admirable Sir Thomas More. In 1535 began 
the dissolution of the monasteries under the zealous superintend- 
ence of Cromwell — afterwards Earl of Essex — who was constituted 
for the purpose Visitor General of these establishments. 

Events now turned in a new current. The month of May of 
this year witnessed the trial and the execution of Queen Anne, in 
less than six months after the death of her predecessor, Catharine 
•of Aragon ; and the marriage of the brutal King to Jane Seymour, 
the new beauty, his passion for whom must be regarded as the 
motive that had impelled him to the deed of blood. Queen Jane, 
dying on the 14th of October, 1537, a few days after having given 
birth to a son, was succeeded by Anne, sister of the Duke of 
Cleves, whom Henry married in January, 1540, and put away in 
six months afterwards. 

§ 90. Thomas Cromwell — 1 4.85-1 54.0. 

With Wolsey all sense of loyalty to England, to its institutions, 
to its freedom, had passed away, and the one duty which the 
statesman owed was his duty to his prince. To what issues such a 
conception of a statesman 'si duty might lead was now to be seen in 
the career of a greater than Wolsey. Thomas Cromwell is, in fact, 
the first English Minister in whom we can trace, through the 
whole period of his rule, the steady working out of a great and 
definite aim of rousing the king to absolute authority, on the ruins 
of every rival power within the realm. The first step towards 
such an end was the freeing of the monarchy from its spiritual 
obedience to Rome. Step after step the way was laid open for the 
great statute by which the new character of the English Church 
was defined in the session of the Parliament of 1534. 



THOMAS CROMWELL 193 

By the Act of Supremacy authority in all matters ecclasiastical 
was vested solely in the crown. The courts spiritual became as 
thoroughly the king's courts as the temporal -courts of West- 
minster. The statute ordered that ''the king shall be taken, ac- 
cepted and reputed the only supreme head on earth of the Church 
of England ; and shall have and enjoy, annexed and united to the 
temporal crown of this realm, the title and the state thereof, as 
well the honors, jurisdiction, authorities, communities, profits and 
commodities to the said dignity belonging ; with full power to 
visit, redress, reform, and amend all such errors, heresies, abuses, 
contempts, and enormities which by any manner of spiritual 
authority or jurisdiction might or may be lawfully reformed." 

Some months afterwards Cromwell was raised to the post of 
Vicar-General or Vicegerent of the King in all matters ecclesias- 
tical. His title, like his office, recalled the system of Wolsey. It 
was not only as Legate but in later years as Vicar- General of the 
Pope, that Wolsey had brought all spiritual causes in England to an 
English court. The supreme ecclesiastical jurisdiction in the realm 
had passed into the hands of a minister, who, as Chancellor, had 
already exercised the supreme civil jurisdiction. The Papal power 
had, therefore, seemed to be transferred to the Crown long before 
the legislative measures, which followed the divorce had actually 
transferred it. It was indeed Catholicism itself that warned men 
to look without surprise on the concentration of all spiritual and 
secular authority in Cromwell. Successor to Wolsey as Keeper 
of the Great Seal, it seemed natural enough that Cromwell should 
succeed him as Vicar-General of the Church ; and that the union 
of the two powers should be restored to the hands of the Minister 
of the King. But the mere fact that these powers were united in 
the hands, not of a priest but of a layman, showed the new drift 
of the royal policy. The Church was no longer to be brought 
indirectly under the royal power: in the policy of Cromwell it 
was to be openly laid prostrate at the foot of the throne. 

Henry had remained true to the standpoint of the New Learn- 
ing ; and the sympathies of Cromwell were mostly with his master. 
They had no wish for any violent break with the ecclesiastical 
forms of the past. They desired religious reform rather than 
religious revolution, a simplification of doctrine rather than 
radical change in it : the purification of worship rather than the 
introduction of any new ritual. Their theology remained, as they 
believed, a Catholic theology ; but a theology cleared of the super- 
14 



194 KNGUSH UTKRATURK 

stitious growths, which had. obscured the true Catholicism of the 
early Church". In a word, their dream was the dream of Erasmus 
and Colet. The .spirit of Erasmus was to be seen in the Articles of 
Religion, which were laid before the Convocation in 1530, in the 
acknowledgment of Justification by Faith, in the condemnation 
of Purgatory, of Pardon and of Masses for the Dead ; and in the 
retention of the ceremonies of the Church without material change. 
A series of royal injunctions, which followed, carried out the same 
policy of reform. Pilgrimages were repressed; the excessive 
number of Holy Days was curtailed ; the worship of images and 
relics was discouraged in words, which seem almost copied from 
Erasmus. 

His appeal for a translation of the Bible, ' ' which weavers might 
repeat at the shuttle and ploughmen sing at their plough, ' ' received 
at last a reply. At the outset of the ministry of Norfolk and More, 
the king had promised an English version of the Scriptures, while 
prohibiting the circulation of Tyndale's Lutheran translation. 
The work, however, lagged in the hands of the bishops, and as 
a preliminary measure the Creed, the Lord's Prayer and the Ten 
Commandments were now rendered into English, and ordered to 
be taught by every school -master to his pupils, and by ever father 
of a family to his children. But the Bishop's Version still hung 
on hand, till in despair of its appearance a friend of Archbishop 
Cranmer, Miles Coverdale was employed to revise and correct 
the translation of Tyndale ; and the Bible which he edited was 
published in 1538, under the avowed personage of Henry himself 

But the force of events was already carrying England far beyond 
the standpoint of Erasmus or More. The dream of the New 
Learning was to be wrought out through the progress of education 
and piety. In the policy of Cromwell, reform was to be brought 
about by the brute force of the monarchy. The story of the royal 
supremacy was graven even on the title page of the New Bible. 
It is Henry on the throne, who gives the sacred volume to Cranmer, 
ere Cranmer. and Cromwell can distribute it to the throng of priests 
and laymen below. Hitherto men had looked upon religious 
truth as a gift of the Church. They were now to look on it as a 
gift from the king. The very gratitude of Englishmen for fresh 
spiritual enlightenment was to tell to the profit of the royal power. 
No conception could be farther from that of the New Learning : 
from the plea for intellectual freedom which runs through the 
life of Erasmus or the craving for political liberty, which gives 



THOMAS CROMWKlvI, 195 

nobleness to the speculations of More. Nor was it possible for 
Henry himself to avoid drifting from the standpoint he had chosen. 

The introduction of the English Bible into the churches gave a 
new opening for the zeal of the Protestants. Instead of royal in- 
junctions that it should be read decently and without comment, 
the young zealots of the party prided themselves on shouting it 
out to a circle of excited hearers during the services of the Mass, 
and accompanied their reading with violent expositions . Protestant 
maidens took the New English Primer to church with them and 
studied ostentatiously during matins. The New Scriptures, in 
Henry's bitter words of complaint, "were disputed, rimed, sang, 
and jangled in every tavern and ale-house." The articles which 
dictated the belief of the English Church roused a furious contro- 
versy. Above all, the Sacrament of the Mass, the centre of the 
Roman Catholic system of faith and worship, which remained 
sacred to the bulk of Englishmen, was attacked with a scurrility 
and profaneness which pass belief. The doctrine of transubstan- 
tiation, which was as yet recognized by law, was held up to scorn 
in ]pallads and mystery plays. In one church a Protestant lawyer 
raised a dog in his hands when the priest elevated the Host. The 
most sacred words of the old worship, the words of consecration, 
"Hoc est Meum Corpus " were, it has been said, travestied into a 
nickname for juggling as "hocus-pocus, "but this most probably 
is not true. 

It was by this attack on the Mass, even more than by any other 
outrages, that the temper both of Henry and the nation was 
aroused to a deep resentment. To punish such outrages committed 
on the part of the Protestants, Henry was invested by the Parlia- 
ment with still greater authority. The monarchy seemed to free 
itself from all parliamentary restrictions whatever, when a formal 
statute gave the king's proclamations the force of parliamentary 
laws. A more terrible reaction was the revival of persecution. 
Burning was announced as the penalty for a denial of transubstan- 
tiation. A refusal to confess or attend Mass was made a felony. 
In London alone five hundred Protestants were indicted under the 
new act. Latimer and Shaxton were imprisoned, and the former 
forced into a resignation of his See. Cranmer himself was only 
saved by Henry's personal favor. 

But the first burst of triumph was no sooner spent than the hand 
of Cromwell made itself felt. Although his opinions remained 
those of the New Learning, and differed but little from the general 



196 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

sentiment, which found itself represented in the Act of Parliament, 
he leaned instinctively to the one party which did not long for his 
fall. His wish was to restrain the Protestant excesses, but he had 
no more mind or further wish to ruin the Protestants . In a little 
time, therefore, the bishops were quietly released. The London 
indictments were quashed. The magistrates were checked in their 
enforcement of the law, while a general pardon cleared the prisons 
of the heretics who had been arrested under its provisions. 

Wolsey, hated as he had been by the nobles, had been sup- 
ported by the Church; but churchmen hated Cromwell with 
an even fiercer hate than the nobles themselves. His only friends 
were the Protestants, and their friendship was more fatal than the 
hatred of his foes. 

Reginal Pole, of royal descent from Edward the Fourth, after 
refusing the highest favors from Henry, as the price of his approval 
of his divorce, had taken refuge at Rome, where he had bitterly 
attacked the King in a book on the "Unity of the Church." But 
he had left hostages in the hands of Henry, his kinsmen. The 
great mercy or benignity of the king was no longer to shelter 
them. In 1538, the Pope, Paul the Third, published a bull of 
excommunication and deposition against Henry ; and Pole pressed 
the Emperor vigorously, but ineffectually, to carry the bull into, 
execution. This effort brought about, as Cromwell had threat- 
ened, the ruin of his house. His brother, and the Marquis of 
Exeter, with other friends of the two great families, were arrested 
on a charge of treason and executed in the opening of 1539, while 
the Countess of Salisbury, his mother, was attainted and sent to 
the Tower. Almost as terrible an act of bloodshed closed the 
year. 

The Abbots of Gladstonbury, Reading and Colchester, men who. 
had Sat as mitred abbots among the lords, were charged with a 
denial of the King's supremacy and hanged as traitors. But 
Cromwell relied for success on something more than terror. His 
single will forced on a scheme of foreign policy, whose aim was 
to bind England to the Reformation while it bound Henry help- 
lessly to his minister. The daring boast which his enemies laid 
afterwards to his charge, whether uttered or not, is but the 
expression of his system. " In brief time he would bring things to 
such a pass that the King with all his power should not be able 
to hinder him. ' ' His plans rested like the plan which proved fatal 
to Wolsey on a fresh marriage of his master. Henry's third 



EDWARD THK SIXTH 197 

Wife, Jane Seymour, had died in childbirth, and in the opening 
of 1540, Cromwell replaced her by a German consort, Anne of 
Cleves, a sister-in-law of the Lutheran Elector of Saxony. He 
dared even to resist Henry's caprice, when the king revolted in 
their first interview from the coarse features and unwieldy form 
of his new bride. For the moment Cromwell had brought matters 
to such a pass ' ' that it was impossible to recoil from the marriage, 
and the minister's election to the Earldom of Essex seemed to 
proclaim his success." 

The marriage, however, of Anne of Cleves, was but the first 
step in a policy, which, if it had been carried out as he designed, 
Would have anticipated the triumph of Richelieu. Charles* and the 
House of Austria could alone bring about a Catholic reaction, 
strong enough to arrest and roll back the Reformation ; and 
Cromwell was no sooner united with the princes of North Germany, 
than he sought to league them with France for the overthrow of 
the Emperor. Had he succeeded, the whole face of Europe would 
have been changed. Southern Germany would have been secured 
for Protestantism, and the Thirty Years' War would have been 
averted. But he failed as men fail who stand ahead of their age. 
The German princes shrunk from a contest with the Emperor; 
France from a struggle that would be fatal to Catholicism. Henry 
Was left alone to bear the resentment of the House of Austria ; and, 
chained to a wife he loathed, he turned savagely on his minister. 
In June the long struggle came to an end. The nobles sprang on 
Cromwell with a fierceness that told of their long-hoarded hate. 
Taunts and execrations burst from the lords at the council table 
as the Duke of Norfolk, who had been entrusted with the min- 
ister's arrest, tore the ensign of the Garter from his neck. At the 
charge of treason Cromwell flung his cap on the ground with a 
passionate cry of despair. "This then," he exclaimed, "is my 
guerdon for the services I have done ! On your consciences I ask 
you, Am I a traitor?' ' Then, with a sudden sense that all was over, 
he bade his foes make quick work and not let him languish in 
prison, and quick work was made. A few days after his arrest he 
was attainted in Parliament, and at the close of July a burst of 
popular applause hailed his death on the scaffold. 

§ 91 . Edward the Sixth. 

The anomalous position of the English Church during the 
reign of Henry VIII, became a scandal to Europe ; for, while 



198 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

some men were burnt for denying the doctrine of transubstantia- 
tion or for refusing to admit the royal supremacy, others suffered 
at the stake for their profession of the Lutheran opinions ; and 
even Cromwell must be regarded in some measure as a victim of 
his attachment to German Protestantism. 

During the reign of Edward VI, Somerset, in conjunction with 
Cranmer, pressed the work of the Reformation apace. Chantries 
and hospitals were everywhere suppressed, and their endowments 
confiscated. The bishops were compelled to acknowledge their 
direct subordination to the crown, by being required to take out 
licenses for their jurisdiction. In 1549 the first book of Common 
Prayer was published and the Act of Uniformity prescribed its 
use, while that of all other forms of devotion was forbidden under 
heavy penalties. The Canon Law was revised by a body of com- 
missioners specially appointed for the purpose, and the new code 
was completed for future use, although it never received the 
young king's signature. By these and other similar reforms, 
carried out in a great measure, under Cranmer's direction, it was 
sought to make the Reformation in England a complete rejoinder 
to the proceedings of the Council assembled at Trent. 

§ 92. Henry, Earl of Surrey. 

In the history of English poetry the name of Lord Surrey takes 
an illustrious place. An Elizabethan tells us how at this time 
' ' sprang up a company of courtly makers — poets — of whom Sir 
Thomas Wyatt, the elder, and Henry, Earl of Surrey, were the 
two chieftains, who, having travelled to Italy, and there tasted the 
sweet and stately manners of Italian poetry — as novices newly 
crept out of the school of Dante, Ariosto and Petrarch — greatly 
polished our rude and homely manner of vulgar poesy from what 
it had been before, and for that cause they may be justly said 
to be the first reformers of our English metre and style." The 
dull moralizings of the rimes that followed Chaucer, the rough but 
vivacious doggerel of Skelton, made way in the hands of Wyatt 
and Surrey for delicate imitations of the songs and sonnets and 
rondels of Italy and France. With the Italian concerts came 
an Italian refinement, whether of words or thoughts; and the 
force and versatility of Surrey's youth showed itself in whimsical 
satires, in elegant translations, in love-sonnets, and in paraphrases 
of the Psalms. 

In his version of two books of the iEneid, he was the first 



THE CATHOLIC REACTION 199 

to introduce into England the Italian blank verse, which was to 
play so great a part in English literature. But with the poetic 
taste of the Renaissance, Surrey inherited its wild and reckless 
energy. Once he was sent to the Fleet — an old prison — for chal- 
lenging a gentleman to fight. Release enabled him to join his 
father in an expedition against Scotland, but he was no sooner 
back than the Londoners complained how at Candlemas the young 
lord and his companions went out with stone-bows at midnight, 
and how next day ' ' there was a great clamor of the breaking of 
many windows, both of houses and churches, and shooting at 
men that might be in the streets. ' ' In spite of his humorous excuse 
that "the jest only proposed to bring home to men, that from 
justice's rod no fault is free ; but all such as work unright in most 
quiet'are next unrest," Surrey paid for this outbreak with a fresh 
arrest, which drove him to find solace in paraphrases of Ecclesi- 
astes and the Psalms. Soon he was over the sea with the English 
troops in Flanders, and, in 1564, serving as marshal of the troops 
to conduct the retreat after the siege of Montreuil. Sent to 
relieve Bologne, he remained in charge of the town till the Spring 
of 1546, when he returned to England to rime sonnets to a fair 
Geraldine, the daugher of the Earl of Kildare, and to plunge into 
the strife around the dying king. 

§ 93. The Catholic Reaction. 

Though Mary was thirty-seven years old when she became 
Queen, the strict retirement in which she had lived left her as 
ignorant of the actual temper of England as England was ignorant 
of her own. She had founded her resistance to the changes of the 
Protectorate on a resolve to adhere to her father's system till her 
brother came of age to rule, and England be longing like herself 
simply for a restoration of what Henry had left. The belief was 
confirmed by her earlier actions. The changes of the Protectorate, 
which Edward had acted out, were treated as null and void. 
Gardiner, Henry's minister, was drawn from the Tower to take 
the lead as Chancellor at the Queen's Council Board. The deposed 
bishops were restored to their sees. Ridley with the others, who 
had displeased them, were again expelled. Latimer, as a repre- 
sentative of the Protestants, was sent to the Tower. 

On an indignant protest from Cranmer against reports that he 
was ready to abandon the new reforms, the Archbishop was sent 
for his seditious demeanor to the Tower, and soon put on his trial 



200 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

for treason with Lady Jane Grey, her husband and two of his 
brothers. Each pleaded guilty, but no attempts were made to 
•carry out the sentence of death. In all this England went with 
the Queen. The popular enthusiasm hardly waited in fact for the 
orders of the government. The whole system, which had been 
pursued during Edward 's reign , fell with a sudden crash . London , 
indeed, retained much of its Protestant sympathy, but over the rest 
of the country the tide of reaction swept without a check. The 
married priests were driven from their churches, and the images 
were replaced. In many parishes the new Prayer Book was set 
aside and the Mass restored. The Parliament which met in Oc- 
tober annulled the laws made respecting religion during the past 
reign, and reestablished the form of service as used in the last 
year of Henry the Eighth. Up to this point the temper of Eng- 
land went fairly with the Queen. 

But here from the first appeared the signs of a radical differ- 
ence between the aim of Mary and that of her people. With the 
restoration of her father's system the nation as a whole was satis- 
fied. Mary, on the other hand, looked on such a restoration 
simply as a step towards a complete revival of the system which 
Henry had done away. Through long years of suffering and peril 
her fanaticism had been patiently brooding over the hope of re- 
storing to England its older religion. She believed, as she said at 
a later time to the Parliament, that ' ' she had been predestined and 
preserved by God to the succession of the Crown for no other pur- 
pose save that He might make use of her above all else in the 
bringing back of the realm to the Catholic faith." Her zeal, how- 
ever, was checked by the fact that she stood almost alone in her 
aim, as well as by cautious advice from her cousin, the Emperor; 
and she assured the Londoners that, "albeit her own conscience 
was stayed in matters of religion, yet she meant not to compel or 
restrain men's consciences otherwise than God should, as she 
trusted, put into their hearts a persuasion of the truth she was in, 
through the opening of this word unto them by godly, and vir- 
tuous, and learned preachers. ' ' Charles V, who a few years before 
was almost absolute master of Germany, had exercised his power 
in such an arbitary manner that he gave extreme disgust to the 
nation, which apprehended the total extinction of their liberties 
from the encroachment of that monarch. Religion had served him 
as a pretense for his usurpations ; and from the same principle he 
met with that opposition which overthrew his grandeur and 
dashed all his ambitious hopes. 



THE CATHOLIC REACTION 201 

Maurice, Elector of Saxony, enraged that the I^andgrave of 
Hesse should be unjustly detained as a prisoner, formed a secret 
conspiracy among the Protestant princes, and, covering his inten- 
tions with the most artful disguises, he suddenly marched his 
forces against Charles, and narrowly missed becoming master of 
his person. The Protestants flew to arms in every quarter ; and 
then insurrection, aided by an invasion from France, reduced the 
Emperor to such difficulties that he was obliged to submit to 
terms of peace, which secured the independency of Germany. 

No sooner did Charles hear of the death of Edward and the 
accession of his kinswoman, Mary, to the Crown of England, than 
he formed the scheme of acquiring that kingdom to his family ; 
and he hoped by this incident to balance all the losses he had 
sustained in Germany. 

His son Philip was a widower; and although he was only 
twenty -seven years of age, eleven years younger than the Queen 
of England, this objection, it was thought, would be overlooked. 
The Emperor, therefore, immediately sent over an agent to signify 
his intentions to Mary, who, pleased with the support of so power- 
ful an alliance, and glad to unite herself more closely to her 
mother's family, to which she was ever strongly attached, readily 
embraced the proposal. Arundel and Paget gave their advice for 
the match. Gardiner, who had become Prime Minister, and who 
had been promoted to the office of Chancellor, finding how Mary's 
inclinations lay, seconded the project of Mary's alliance. At the 
same time, he represented both to her and the Emperor the neces- 
sity of stopping all further innovations in religion till the comple- 
tion of the marriage. He observed that the Parliament, amidst all 
their compliances, had discovered evident symptoms of jealousy, 
and seemed at present determined to grant no further concessions 
in favor of the Catholic religion ; that though they might make a 
sacrifice to their sovereign of some speculative principles which 
they did not well comprehend, or of some rites that seemed of no 
very great importance, they had imbibed such strong prejudices 
against the pretended usurpations and exactions of the Court of 
Rome ; that they would with great difficulty be again brought to 
submit to its authority ; that much pains had been taken to preju- 
dice the nation against the Spanish alliance; and, if that point 
were urged at the same time with further changes in religion, that 
it would hazard a general revolt and insurrection. 

The marriage being once completed would give authority to the 



202 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Queen's measures and enable her afterwards to forward the pious 
work in which she was engaged ; and that it was even necessary 
previously to reconcile the people to the marriage by rendering 
the conditions extremely favorable to the English, such as would 
seem to secure to them their independency, and their entire pos- 
session of their ancient laws and privileges. The Emperor, well 
acquainted with the prudence and experience of Gardiner, 
assented to all these reasons, and endeavored to temper the zeal 
of many by representing the necessity of proceeding gradually in 
the great work of converting the nation. 

But while the nation grumbled and the Parliament remonstrated, 
one party in the realm was filled with absolute panic by the news 
of the Spanish match. The Protestants saw in the marriage, not 
only the final overthrow of their religious hopes, but a close of 
the religious truce, and an opening of persecution. The general 
opposition to the match, with the dread of the holders of Church 
lands, that their possessions were in danger, encouraged the more 
violent to plan a rising. The real aim of the rebellion was, no 
doubt, the displacemnt of Mary and the setting either of Jane Grey, 
or, as the bulk of the Protestants desired, of Elizabeth, on the 
throne. But these thoughts were cautiously hidden and the con- 
spirators declared their aim to be that of freeing the Queen from 
evil counsellors, and preventing her union with the Prince of Spain. 

The plan combined three simultaneous outbreaks of revolt. Sir 
Peter Carew engaged to raise the West, the Duke of Suffolk to 
call the midland counties to arms, while Sir Thomas Wyatt led the 
Kentish men on London . The uprising was planned for the spring 
of 1554, but the vigilance of the government drave it to a prema- 
ture explosion in the month of January, and baffled it in the centre 
and in the West. Carew fled to France; Suffolk, who appeared 
in arms at Leicester, found small response from the people, and 
was soon sent prisoner to the Tower. The Kentish power, how- 
ever, appeared a more formidable danger. A cry that the Span- 
iards were coming ' ' to conquer the realm ' ' drew thousands to 
Wyatt 's standard. The ships in the Thames submitted to be 
seized by the insurgents. A party of the train -bands of London, 
that marched with the royal guard under the old Duke of Suffolk 
against them, deserted to the rebels in a mass, with shouts of " A 
Wyatt, a Wyatt ! We are all Englishmen ! ' ' 

Had the Kentish men moved quickly on the capital its gates 
would have been flung open, and success would have been assured. 



THE CATHOLIC REACTION 203 

But at this critical moment Mary was saved by her queenly 
courage. Riding boldly to the Guildhall she appealed with a 
"man's voice" to the loyalty of the citizens, and denounced the 
declaration of Wyatt's followers as "a Spanish cloak to cover 
their purpose against our religion." She pledged herself "on the 
word of a Queen, that if it shall not probably appear to all the 
nobility and commons in the high court of Parliament, that this 
marriage shall not be for the high benefit and commodity of the 
whole realm, then will I abstain from marriage while I live." 

The pledge was a momentous one, for it owned the very claim 
of the two Houses, which the Queen had haughtily rejected; and, 
the remonstrances of the Parliament still fresh in their ears, the 
Londoners may well have believed that the marriage would come 
quietly to an end. The dread, too, of any change in religion by 
the return of the violent Protestantism of Edward's day, could 
hardly fail to win for Mary a support among the citizens. The 
Mayor of London answered for their loyalty, and when Wyatt 
appeared on the Southwark bank, the bridge was secured against 
him . But the rebel knew that the issue of the revolt hung on the 
question which side London would take, and that a large part of 
Londoners favored his cause. Marching, therefore, up the Thames 
he seized a bridge at Kingston, threw his force across the river, 
and turned rapidly back upon the Capital. But a night march 
along miry roads had wearied and disorganized his men ; the bulk 
of them were cut off from their leader by a royal force which had 
gathered in the fields, at what is now Hyde Park Corner ; and only 
Wyatt himself, with a handful of followers, pushed desperately 
upon the Palace of St. James, whence the Queen refused to fly 
even while the rebels were marching beneath the walls along the 
Strand to Ludgate. "I have kept touch," he cried, as he sank 
exhausted at the gate . But it was closed ; his adherents within 
were powerless to effect their promised diversion in his favor ; and 
as he fell back the daring leader was surrounded at Temple Bar 
and sent to the Tower. 

The failure of the revolt was fatal to the girl whom part at least 
of the rebels would have placed on the throne, Lady Jane Grey. 
As the granddaughter of Mary, Duchess of Suffolk, sister to 
Henry VIII, the succession to the crown altered in her favor by 
the death of Edward VI. Up to this time she had been spared 
and treated with great leniency, but now she was sent to the block ; 
and her father, her husband and her uncle atoned for the ambition 



204 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

of the House of Suffolk by the death of traitors. Wyatt and his 
chief adherents followed them to execution, while the bodies of 
the poorer insurgents were dangling on gibbets around London. 
Elizabeth, who had with some reason been suspected of complicity 
in the insurrection, was sent to the Tower, and only saved from 
death by the interposition of the Council. The leading Protestants 
fled in terror over the sea. 

But the failure of the revolt did more than crush the Protestant 
party; it enabled the Queen to lay aside the mask of moderation, 
which had been forced on her by the earlier difficulties of her 
reign. An order for the expulsion of all married clergymen from 
their cures, with the deprivation of nine bishops, who had been 
appointed during the Protectorate, and who had represented its 
religious tendencies, proved that the Queen resolved to enter upon 
a course of reaction. Her victory secured the Spanish marriage. 
It was to prevent Philip's union to Mary that Wyatt had risen, 
and, with his overthrow, the Queen's policy stood triumphant. 
The whole strength of the conservative opposition was lost when 
opposition could be branded as disloyalty. Mary, too, was true 
to the pledge she had given that the match should only be brought 
about with the assent of Parliament. But pressure was unscrupu- 
lously used to secure compliant members in the new elections, 
and a reluctant assent to the marriage was wrung from both Houses 
when they assembled in the spring. 

Philip was created King of Naples by his father to give dignity 
to the union, and in the following July, Mary met him at Win- 
chester and became his wife. From the moment of his arrival 
the young King exerted a powerful influence over the government, 
and he was gradually drawing into his hands the entire direction 
of affairs. But bigot as he was in matters of faith his temper was 
that of a statesman, not of a fanatic. If he came to England 
resolute to win the country to union with his own Church, his 
conciliatory policy was already seen in the concessions he wrested 
from the Papacy in the matter of the Church lands ; and his aim 
was rather to hold England together and to give time for reaction 
of opinion than to revive the old discord by measures of severity. 
It was indeed only from a united and contented England that he 
could hope for effective aid in the struggle of his house with 
France ; and in spite of his pledges, Philip's aim in marrying Mary 
was to secure that aid. 

But whether from without or from within, warning was wasted 



ROWLAND TALYOR 205 

on the fierce bigotry of the Queen. It was, as Gardiner asserted, 
not at the counsel of her ministers, but by her own personal will, 
that the laws against heresy had been laid before Parliament, and, 
now that they were enacted, Mary pressed for their execution. 
Her resolve was probably quickened by the action of the Pro- 
testant zealots. The failure of Wyatt's revolt was far from taming 
the enthusiasm of the wild reformers. 

The restoration of the old worship was followed by outbreaks 
of bold defiance. A tailor of St. Giles in the field, shaved a dog 
with the priestly tonsure. A cat was found hanging in the church 
with her head shorn, and the likeness of a vestment cast over her, 
with her fore-feet tied together, and a round piece of paper, like a 
swinging cake, between them. Yet more galling were the ballads 
which were circulated in mockery of the Mass ; the pamphlets 
which came from exiles over the sea; the seditious broadsides 
dropped in the streets ; and the interludes, in which the most sacred 
acts of the old religion were flooded with ribald mockery. All 
defiance, however, served to quicken afresh the purpose of the 
Queen. But it was not till the opening of 1555, when she had 
been a year and a half on the throne, that the opposition of her 
counsellors was at last mastered, and the persecution began. In 
February the deprived Bishop of Gloucester, Hooper, was burned 
in the cathedral city; a London vicar, Lawrence Sanders, at Cov- 
entry; and Rogers, a prebendary of St. Paul's, at London. 
Ferrar, the deprived Bishop of St. David's, who was burned at 
Caermarthon, was one of the eight victims who suffered in March. 
Four followed in April and May, six in June, eleven in July, 
eighteen in August, and eleven in September. In October, Ridley, 
the deprived Bishop of London, was drawn with Latimer from 
the prison at Oxford. " Play the man" cried the old preacher of 
the Reformation, as the flames shot up around him, "we shall 
this day light up a candle by God's grace in England as I trust 
shall never be put out." 

§ 94. Rowland Taylor. 

If the Protestants had not known how to govern, in fact, they 
knew how to die; and the cause, which had been ruined by pros- 
perity, revived in the dark hour of persecution. The memory of 
their greed and violence faded away as they passed, unwavering, to 
their doom. Such a story as that of Rowland Taylor, the Vicar of 
Hadleigh, tells us more of the work which was begun, and of the 



206 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

effects which it was likely to produce, than pages of historical 
dissertation. Taylor, who was a man of rank, had been the first 
victim chosen for execution ; he was arrested in London, and con- 
demned to suffer in his own parish. " His wife, suspecting that 
her husband should that night be carried away, had waited through 
the darkness, with her children, in the porch of St. Batolph's, 
beside Algate. Now when the sheriff and his company came 
against St. Batolph's Church, Elizabeth, a young daughter, cried, 
saying : ' O my dear father ! Mother ! mother ! here is my father 
led away.' Then cried his wife, ' Rowland ! Rowland ! where art 
thou?' for it was a very dark morning, that the one could not 
see the other. Dr. Taylor answered, ' I am here, dear wife, and 
stayed.' 

' 'The sheriff's men would have led him forth, but the sheriff said, 
'Stay a little, masters, I pray you, let him speak to his wife.' 
Then came she to him, and he took his daughter Mary in his 
arms, and he and his wife and Elizabeth kneeled down and said 
the Lord's Prayer. At which sight the sheriff wept apace and so 
did divers others of the company. After they had prayed, he rose 
up and kissed his wife, shook her by the hand and said : ' Fare- 
well, my dear wife, be of good comfort, for I am quiet in my 
conscience ! God shall still be a father to my children.' Then said 
his wife, ' God be with thee, dear Roland. I will with God's 
grace, meet thee at Hadleigh.' 

"All the way Dr. Taylor was merry and cheerful as one that 
accounted going to a most pleasant banquet or bridal. Coming 
within sight of Hadleigh, he desired to light off his horse, which 
done, he leaped and set a frist or twain as men commonly do for 
dancing. 'Why, Master Doctor, ' quoth the sheriff, 'how do you 
now?' He answered, 'Well, God be praised, Master Sheriff, never 
better; for now I know I am almost at home. I lack not past 
two stiles to go over, and I am even at my father's house.' 

' ' The streets of Hadleigh were beset on both sides with men and 
women of the town and country who waited to see. When they 
beheld him led to death, with weeping eyes and lamentable voices, 
they cried, 'Ah, good Lord ! there goeth our good shepherd from 
us!' The journey, at last was over. 'What place is this?' he 
asked, 'and what meaneth it that so many people are gathered 
together?' It was answered, 'It is Old Common, the place where 
you must suffer, and the people are come to look at you. ' ' Then, ' 
said he, 'thanked be God that I am even at home.' But when 



THK ENGLISH PARLIAMENT 207 

the people saw his reverend and ancient face, with a long white 
beard, they burst out with weeping tears and cried, saying, ' God, 
save thee, good Dr. Taylor ; God strengthen and keep thee ; the 
Holy Ghost comfort thee !' He wished, but was not suffered to 
speak. When he had prayed, he went to the stake and kysed it, 
and set himself into a pitch-barrel, which they had set for him to 
stand on, and so stood with his back upright to the stake, with 
his hands folded together and his eyes toward Heaven, and so let 
himself be burned. One of the executors cruelly cast a faggot at 
him, which hit him on his face and brake his face so that the blood 
ran down his visage. Then said Dr. Taylor, 'O friend, I have 
enough ; what needed that ? ' One more act of brutality brought 
his sufferings to an end. So stood he still with his hands folded 
together, till Joyce, with a halberd, struck him on the head that 
his brains fell out, and the corpse fell down into the fire." 

§ 95. The English Parliameyit. 

In calling together the Estates of the realm, Edward the First 
determined the course of English history. From the moment of 
its appearance the Parliament became the centre of English affairs. 
The hundred years which followed its assembly at Westminster 
saw its rise into a power which checked and overawed the crown. 

Of the kings, in whose reigns the Parliament gathered this 
mighty strength, not one was likely to look with indifference on 
the growth of a rival authority, and the bulk of them were men 
who in other times would have roughly checked it. What held 
their hand was the need of the crown. The century and a half 
that followed the gathering of the estates at Westminster was a 
time of almost continual war, and of the financial pressure that 
springs from war. It was indeed war that had gathered them. 
In calling his Parliament, Edward the First, sought mainly an 
affective means of securing supplies for that policy of national 
consolidation which had triumphed in Wales, and which seemed 
to be triumphing in Holland. But the triumph in Scotland soon 
proved a delusive one, and the strife brought wide strifes in its 
train. When Edward wrung from Balliot an acknowledgment 
of his suzerainty, he foresaw little of the war with France, the 
war with Spain, the quarrel iwith the Papacy, the upgrowth of 
social, of political, of religious revolution within England itself, 
of which that acknowledgment was to be the prelude. But the 
thicker the troubles gathered round England the more the royal 



208 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

treasury was dreaded, and, now that arbitary taxation was impos- 
sible, the one means of filling it lay in a summons of the Houses. 
The crown was chained to the Parliament by a tie of discord 
instead of peace. War went ceaselessly on, and with the march 
of war went on the ceaseless growth of the Parliament. 

§ 96. Queen Elizabeth — 1533-16 03. 

Whilst fires burned in Smithfield, and news of defeat came 
from over the sea, and whilst Protestant zealots hounded men on 
to assassination and revolt, the bulk of Englishmen looked quietly 
from the dying queen to the girl who, in a little while, must wear 
the crown. What nerved men to endure the shame and bloodshed 
about them, was the certainty of the speedy succession of the 
daughter of Anne Boleyn. Elizabeth was now in her twenty-fifth 
year. Personalty she had much of her mother's charm, if not 
more than her mother's beauty. Her figure was commanding, 
her face long, but queenly and intelligent, her eyes quiet and fine. 

She had grown up amidst the liberal culture of Henry's court, 
a bold horsewoman, a good shot, a graceful dancer, a skilled 
musician, and an accomplished scholar. Even among the highly 
trained women who caught the impulse of the New Learning, she 
stood in the extent of her acquisitions without a peer. Ascham, 
who was succeeded by Grindal and Chake in the direction of her 
studies, tells us how keen and resolute was Elizabeth's love of 
learning, already even in her girlhood. At sixteen she showed ' ' a 
man's power of application " to her books. She had read almost 
the whole of Cicero and a great part of Livy. She began the day 
with the study of the New Testament in Greek, and followed this 
up by reading selected orations of Isocrates, and the tragedies 
of Sophocles. She could speak Latin with fluency, and Greek 
moderately well. Her love of classical culture lasted throughout 
her life. Amidst the press and cares of her latter reign we find 
Ascham recording how ' ' after dinner I went up to read with the 
Queen's majesty that noble oration of Demosthenes against 
Aeschines." At a later time her Latin served her to rebuke the 
insolence of a Polish ambassador, and she could ' ' rub up her rusty 
Greek" at need to bandy pedantry with a Vice Chancellor. 

But Elizabeth was far as yet from being a mere pedant. She 
could already speak French and Italian as fluently as her mother 
tongue. In later days we find her familiar with Ariosto and 
Tasso. The purity of her literary taste, the love for a chaste and 



QUEEN ELIZABETH 209 

simple style, which Aseham noted with praise in her childhood, 
had not yet perished nnder the influence of Euphuism. But even 
amidst the affectation and love of anagrams and puerilities, which 
sullied her later years, Elizabeth remained a lover of letters, and 
all that was greatest and purest in Letters. She listened with 
delight to the "Fairy Queen," and found a smile for "Master 
Spenser," when he appeared in her presence. 

It was with the religious difficulty that Elizabeth was soon 
called forth to deal ; and the way in which she dealt with it showed 
the peculiar bent of her mind. The young Queen was not without 
some sense of religion at moments of peril or deliverance 
throughout her reign : her acknowledgment of divine protection 
took a strange depth and earnestness. But she was almost desti- 
tute of spiritual emotion, or of any consciousness of the vast 
questions with which theology strove to deal. While the world 
around her swayed more and more by theological belief and con- 
troversies, Elizabeth was absolutely untouched by them. She was 
a child of the Italian Renascence rather than of the New Learn- 
ing of Colet or Erasmus, and her attitude towards the enthusiasm 
of her time was that of Lorenzo de Medici towards Savonarola. 
Her mind was untroubled by spiritual problems which were vexing 
the minds around her: to Elizabeth, they were a little ridiculous. 
She had been brought up under Henry amidst the Ritual of the 
older Church ; under Edward she had submitted to the English 
Prayer Book, and drank much of the Protestant theology; and 
under Mary she was ready, after a slight resistance, to conform 
again to the Mass. 

Her temper remained unchanged throughout the course of her 
reign. She showed the same intellectual contempt for the super- 
stition of the Romanist as she did for the bigotry oi the Protestant. 
Whilst she ordered Catholic images to be flung into the fire, she 
quizzed the Puritans as ' ' brethren in Christ. ' ' But she had no sort 
of religious aversion for either Puritan or Papist. The Protestants 
grumbled at the Catholic nobles whom she admitted to her pres- 
ence : the Catholics grumbled at the Protestant statesmen whom she 
called to her council board. To Elizabeth, however, the arrange- 
ment was the most natural thing in the world. She looked at 
the theological differences in a purely political light. It seemed 
an obvious thing to her to hold out hopes of conversion as a means 
of deceiving Philip, or to gain a point in negotiations by restoring 
the crucifix to her chapel. The first interest in her mind was the 
15 



210 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

interest of public order ; and she never would understand how it 
could fail to be the first in every one's mind. 

One memorable change marked the nobler side of the policy 
she brought with her to the throne. Her decision was at once 
followed by a dose of the religious persecution. Whatever might 
be the changes that awaited the country, conformity was no longer 
to be enforced by the penalty of death. At a moment when 
Philip was presiding at Autos-da-fe, and Henry of France plotting 
a massacre of his Huguenot subjects, such a resolve as hers was a 
gain for humanity as well as a step towards religious toleration. 
Through all her long reign, save a few Anabaptists, whom the 
whole nation loathed as blasphemers of God, and dreaded as 
enemies of social order, no heretic was "sent to the fire." It was 
a far greater gain to humanity when the Queen declared her will 
to meddle in no way with the conscience of her subjects. She 
would hear of no inquisition into a man's private thoughts on 
religious matters or into his personal religion. One could boldly 
assert in her name, at a later time, the right of every Englishman 
to perfect liberty of religious opinion. Such a liberty of opinion, 
however, by no means implied liberty of public worship. On the 
incompatibility of freedom of worship with public order, both 
Catholics and Protestants were as yet at one. The most advanced 
Reformers did not dream of contending for a right to stand apart 
from the national religion. What they sought was to make the 
national religion their own. 

But men watched curiously to see what religion the Queen 
would establish. Even before her accession the keen eyes of the 
Spanish embassy had noticed her ' ' great admiration for the king 
her father's mode of carrying on matters, " as a matter of ill omen 
for the interests of Catholicism. He had noticed that the ladies 
about her and the counsellors, on whom she seemed about to rely, 
were, like Cecil, "held to be heretic." " I fear much," he wrote, 
"that in religion she will not go right." As keen an instinct 
warned the Protestants that the tide had turned. The cessation 
of the burnings, and the release of all persons imprisoned for 
religion, seemed to receive their interpretation wdien Elizabeth, on 
her entry into London, kissed an English Bible and promised 
' ' diligently to read therein. ' ' 

What shaped Elizabeth's course, in fact, was a hard necessity. 
She found herself at war with France and Scotland, and her throne 
threatened by the claim of Mary Stuart, at once Queen of Scotland 



QUEEN ELIZABETH 2 1 1 

and the wife of the Dauphin Francis . On Elizabeth 's accession Mary 
and Francis assumed, by the French king's order, the arms and 
style of English sovereigns ; and if war continued it was clear 
that their intentions would be backed by the forces of Henry II, 
the French king, as well as by the efforts of the Scots. Nor was 
there any sign that Elizabeth had resolved on a defiance of the 
Papacy. She was firm indeed to assert her father's claim of 
supremacy over the clergy and her own title to the throne ; but 
the difficulties in the way of accommodation on these points were 
such as could be settled by negotiation; and, acting on Cecil's 
counsel, Elizabeth announced her accession to the Pope. The 
announcement showed her purpose of making no violent break in 
the relations of England and the Papal See. But between Eliza- 
beth and the Papacy lay the fatal question of the Divorce. To 
acknowledge the young Queen was, not only to own her mother's 
marriage, but to cancel the solemn judgment of the Holy See in 
Catharine's favor; and its solemn assertion of her own bastardy. 
The temper of Pope Paul the Fourth took fire at the news. He 
reproached Elizabeth for her presumption in ascending the throne ; 
recalled the Papal judgment which pronounced her illegitimate; 
and summoned her to submit her claims to his tribunal. Much 
of this indignation was no doubt merely diplomatic. If the Pope 
listened to the claims of Mary Stuart, which were urged upon him 
by the French Court, it was probably only for the purpose of 
using them to bring pressure to bear on Elizabeth and on the 
stubborn country. 

The summons to submit the Queen's claim of succession to the 
judgment of Rome produced its old effect. Elizabeth was driven, 
as Henry had been driven to assert the right of the nation, to 
decide on questions which affected its very life. A Parliament, 
which met in January, 1559, acknowledged the legitimacy of 
Elizabeth and her title to the crown ; and such an acknowledg- 
ment, in the teeth of the Papal repudiation of Anne Boleyn's 
marriage, carried with it a repudiation of the supremacy of the 
Pope. 

But cautious as had been Elizabeth's movements and skilfully 
as she had hidden the real drift of her measures from the bulk of 
her people, the religion of England had been changed. The old 
service was gone. The old bishops were gone. The Royal 
Supremacy was again restored. All connection with Rome was 
again broken. The repudiation and the restoration of the Prayer 



212 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Book, in the teeth of the unanimous opposition of the priesthood, 
had established the great principle of the Reformation : that the 
form of a nation's faith should be determined not by the clergy 
but by the nation itself. Different, therefore, as was the temper 
of the government, the religious attitude of England was once 
more what it had been under Edward VI. At the most critical 
moment of the strife between the new and the old religion, Eng- 
land had ranged itself on the side of Protestantism. There was 
only the later history of Elizabeth's reign, which was to reveal 
of what mighty importance this Protestantism was to prove. 

§ 97. The Elizabethan Era — 755 9-1603. 

The phrase "Literature of the Age of Elizabeth," is not con- 
fined to the literature produced in the reign of Queen Elizabeth ; 
but is the general name for an era in literature commencing about 
the middle of her reign, reaching its maturity in the reign of 
James I, and perceptibly declining in the reign of his son. It is 
called by the name of Elizabeth because it was produced in con- 
nection with influences, which originated or culminated in her 
time, and did not altogether cease to act after her death ; and these 
influences give to its great works — whether published in her reign 
or in the reign of James — certain mental and moral characteristics 
in common. 

The general awakening of national life, the increase of wealth, 
of refinement and leisure, that characterized the reign of Eliza- 
beth, were accompanied by a general quickening of intelligence. 
The Renascence had done little for English Letters. The over- 
powering influence of the new models both of thought and style, 
which it gave to the world in the writers of Greece and Rome, 
was at first felt only as a fresh check to the ' revival of English 
poetry or prose. Though England shared more than any European 
country in the political and ecclesiastical results of the New 
Learning, its literary results were far less than in the rest of 
Europe, in Italy, Germany or France. Sir Thomas More alone 
ranks among the great classical scholars of the sixteenth century. 
Classical learning, indeed, all but perished at the Universities in 
the storm of the Reformation, nor did it revive there till the close 
of Elizabeth's reign. Insensibly, however, the influences of the 
Renascence fertilized the intellectual soil of England for the rich 
harvest that was to come. 

The court poetry, which clustered around Wyatt and Surrey, 



THK KUZABKTHAN AGE 213 

exotic and imitative as it was, promised a new life for English 
verse. The love of travel, which became so remarkable a char- 
acteristic of Elizabeth's age, quickened the temper of the wealthier 
nobles. ' ' Home-keeping youths, ' ' says Shakespeare, in words that 
mark the time, "have ever homely wits;" and a tour over the 
Continent became part of the education of a gentleman. Fairfax's 
version of Tasso and Harington's version of Ariosto were signs 
of the influence which the literature of Italy, the land to which 
travel most frequently led, excited upon English minds. The 
classical writers told upon England at large, when they were 
popularized by a crowd of translators. Chapman's noble version 
of Homer stands high above its fellows ; but all the greater poets 
and historians of the ancient world were turned into English before 
the close of the sixteenth century. 

It is characteristic of England that the first kind of literature 
to rise from the long death was the literature of history. But the 
form in which it rose marked the difference between the world in 
which it had perished, and that in which it reappeared. During 
the Middle Ages the world had been without a past, save the 
shadowy and unknown past of early Rome; and annalist and 
chronicler told the story of the years which went before in a pref- 
ace to their tales of the present, without a sense of any difference 
between them. But during the religious, social and political 
•changes which passed over England, the New Monarchy broke 
the continuity of its life ; and the depth of the rift between the two 
ages is seen by the way in which History passes, on its revival 
under Elizabeth, from the mediaeval form of pure narrative to its 
modern form of investigation and reconstruction of the past. 

The new interest which attaches to the by-gone world led to 
the collection of its annals, their reprinting and embodiment in an 
English shape. It was his desire to give the Elizabethan Church 
a. basis in the past as much as any pure zeal for letters, which 
induced Archbishop Parker to lead the way in the first of these 
labors. The collections of these historical manuscripts, which, 
following in the track of Eeland, he rescued from the wreck of the 
monastic libraries, created a school of antiquarian imitators, whose 
research and industry have preserved for us almost every work of 
permanent value, which existed before the dissolution of the 
monasteries. 

The first attempt to celebrate in verse the events of English 
history, was made in a work entitled ' 'A Mirrour for Magistrates, ' ' 



214 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

a series of stories by various authors, taken from English history, 
and published in 1559. Thomas Sackville planned the entire 
work, and although his own portion in its composition was small 
— consisting only of the introduction and one tale — it is far 
superior to the rest of the production, and may be compared with 
Spenser in luxurious description and powerful imagination . The 
interest of this work was, however, rather moral than patriotic, 
the stories being intended as lessons of virtue, and as guides to 
kings and statesmen in their conduct. But the impulse, which 
sprang from national triumph, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, 
the successful establishment of the Reformation — and from na- 
tional love, awakened by political repose and social comfort — led 
to a somewhat unique outburst of national poetry as one of the 
manifestations of the intense patriotism of the time, and of the 
interest felt by the English people in their own country and his- 
tory. 

The best specimens of this class of poetry are William Warner's 
' ' Albion's England, " in 1586, a versified history of England from 
the Deluge to the reign of Elizabeth; Samuel Daniel's "History 
of the Civil Wars Between Lancaster and York," in 1595, a poem 
on the struggle between the Lancastrians and the Yorkists; and 
the three works of Michael Drayton: "The Barons' Wars," a. 
poetical account of the events of the reign of Edward II ; " Eng- 
land 's Heroic Epistles," in 1598; and the " Poly-Olbion," in 1613, 
the most ambitious of all, being a description of the scenery of 
England and Wales, together with an account of local traditions 
in fifteen thousand Alexandrine couplets — a colossus of industry. 
Drayton was the last of these patriotic poets. 

A far higher development of English literature sprang from the 
growing influence, which Italy was exerting partly through travel 
and partly through its poetry and romances, on the manners and 
taste of the times. Men made more account of a story of Boccac- 
cio, it was said, than of a story from the Bible. The dress, the 
speech, the manners of Italy, became objects of almost passion- 
ate imitation, and of an imitation not of the wisest and noblest 
kind. To Ascham it seemed like "the enchantment of Circe 
brought out of Italy to mar men's manners in England." "An 
Italianate Englishman," ran the harder proverb of Italy itself , 
"is an incarnate devil." The literary form which this imitation 
took seemed at any rate ridiculous. John Lyly — 1 554-1 606 — dis- 
tinguished both as a dramatist and a poet, laid aside the tradition 



THE ELIZABETHAN AGE 215 

of English style for a style modelled on the decadence of Italian 
prose. 

Euphuism, as the new fashion has been named from the prose 
romances of the Euphues, which Lyly published in 1579, is best 
known to modern readers by the pitiless caricature in which 
Shakespeare quizzed its pedantry, the meaningless monotony of 
its far-fetched phrases, the absurdity of its extravagant conceits. 
Its representative in "Love's Labor Lost" is "a man of fire, new 
words, fashion's own knight, that hath a mint of phrases in his 
brain, one whom the music of his own vain tongue doth ravish 
like enchanting harmony." But its very extravagance sprang 
from the general burst of delight in the new resources of thought 
and language, which literature felt to be at its disposal ; and the 
new sense of literary beauty which it disclosed in its affectation, 
its love of " a mint of phrases and the music of its ever vain 
tongue." The new sense of pleasure which it revealed in deli- 
cacy or grandeur of expression, in the structure and arrangement 
of expression, in what has been termed the atmosphere of words, 
was a sense out of which style was itself to spring. 

For a time Euphuism had all its own way. Queen Elizabeth 
was the most affected and detestable of Euphuists ; and ' ' that 
beauty in court which could not parley Euphuism," a courtier in 
the time of Charles the First, "was as little regarded as she that 
now there speaks not French." The fashion, however, passed 
away; but the "Arcadia" of Sir Philip Sidney — 1554-15 86 — 
shows the wonderful advance which prose had made under its 
influence. Sidney, the nephew of Lord Leicester, was the idol 
of his time, and perhaps no figure reflects the age more fully and 
more beautifully. As far as he was brave, quick of wit as of 
affection, noble and generous in temper, dear to Elizabeth as to 
Spenser, the darling of the court and the camp, his learning and 
his genius made him the centre of the literary world, which was 
springing into birth on English soil. He had travelled in France 
and Italy, he was master alike of the older learning and of the 
new discoveries of astronomy. 

Bruno dedicated to him as to a friend his metaphysical specula- 
tions: he was familiar with the drama of Spain, the poems of 
Ronsard, the sonnets of Italy. He combined the wisdom of a 
grave councilor with the romantic chivalry of a knight-errant. 
" I never heard the old story of Percy and Douglas," he says, 
"that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet." 



216 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

He flung away his life to save the English army in Flanders, and 
as he lay dying they brought a cup of water to his fevered lips. 
He bade them give it to a soldier who was stretched on the ground 
beside him. "Thy necessity," he said, " is greater than mine." 
The whole of Sidney's nature, his chivalry and his learning, his 
thirst for adventures, his freshness of tone, his tenderness and 
childlike simplicity of heart, his affectation and false sentiment, 
his keen sense of pleasure and delight, pours itself out in the pas- 
toral medley, forced, tedious, and yet strangely beautiful, of his 
"Arcadia." In his "Defence of Poesie," the youthful exuber- 
ance of manner has passed into the earnest vigor and grandiose 
Stateliness of the rhetorician. But, whether in one work or the 
other, the flexibility, the music, the luminous clearness of Sidney's 
style remain the same. 

But the quickness and vivacity of English prose was first devel- 
oped in a school of Italian imitators, which appeared in Elizabeth's 
later years. The origin of English fiction is to be found in the 
tales and romances with which Greene and Nashe crowded the 
market, models for which they found in the Italian novels. The 
brief form of these novelettes soon led to the appearance of the 
Pamphlets ; a new world of readers was seen in the rapidity with 
which their stories or scurrilous libels that were issued, and the 
greediness with which they were devoured'. 

It was the boast of Greene that in the eight years before his 
death he had produced forty pamphlets. " In a night or a day he 
would have yarked up a pamphlet as well as in seven years, and 
glad was that printer that might be blessed to pay him dear for the 
very dregs of his wit." Modern eyes see less of the wit than the 
dregs in the books of Greene and his compeers ; but the attacks, 
which Nashe directed against the Puritans and his rivals, were 
the first English works which shook off utterty the pedantry and 
extravagance of Euphuism. In his lightness, his facility, his 
vivacity, his directness of speech, we have the beginnings of 
popular literature. It had descended from the closet to the street, 
and the very change implied that the street was ready to receive it. 
The abundance, indeed, of printers and of printed books at the 
close of the Queen's reign, shows that the world of readers and 
writers had widened far beyond the small circle of scholars and 
courtiers with which it began. 

But to the local and rational influences which were telling on 
English literature was added that of the restlessness and curiosity 



THE ELIZABETHAN AGE 217 

which characterized the age. At the moment which we have 
reached, the sphere of human interests, as it has never been 
widened before or since, was widened by the revelation of a new 
heaven and of a new earth. It was only in the latter years of the 
sixteenth century that the discoveries of Copernicus were brought 
to the general intelligence of mankind by Kepler and Galileo; 
and that the daring of the Bucaneers broke through the veil, 
which the greed of Spain had drawn across the New World of 
Columbus. 

Hardly inferior to these revelations, as a source of intellectual 
impulse, was the sudden and picturesque way in which the various 
races of the world were brought face to face with one another, 
through the universal passion for foreign travel. While the red 
tribes of the West were described by Amerigo Vespucci, and the 
strange civilization of Mexico and Peru disclosed by Cortes and 
Pizarro, the voyages of the Portuguese threw open the older splen- 
dors of the East ; and the story of India and China was told for 
the first time in Christendom by Maffei and Mendosa. England 
took her full part in this world of discovery. 

Jenkinson, an English traveller, made his way to Bokhara: 
Willoughby brought back Muscovy to the knowledge of Western 
Europe. English manners penetrated among the Esquimaux or 
settled in Virginia. Drake circumnavigated the globe. The 
"Collection of Voyages," which was published by Hakluyt, in 
1582, disclosed the vastness of the world itself, the infinite number 
of the races of mankind, the variety of their laws, their customs, 
their religions, their very instincts. We see the influence of this 
wider extension of the world, not only in the life and richness 
which it gave to the imagination of the time, but in the immense 
interest which from this moment attached itself to man. Shakes- 
peare's conception of Caliban, like the questioning of Montaigue, 
marks the beginning of a new and truer era, because a more in- 
ductive philosophy of human nature and human society began to 
manifest itself. The fascination exercised by the study of human 
character showed itself in the Essays of Bacon, and yet more in 
the popularity of the drama. 

And to these larger and world-wide sources of poetic power was 
added in England, at the moment we have reached in the story, 
the impulse which sprang from national triumph, from the vic- 
tory over the Armada, the deliverance from Spain, the rolling 
away of the Catholic terror, which had hung like a cloud over 



218 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

the hopes of the new people. With its new sense of security, its 
new sense of national energy and national power, the whole aspect 
of England suddenly changed. As } T et the interest of Elizabeth's 
reign had been political and material ; the stage had been crowded 
with statesmen and warriors, with Cecils and Walsinghams and 
Drakes . Literature had as yet hardly found a place in the glories 
of the time. But from the moment when the Armada drifted, 
back-broken, to Ferrol, in Spain, the figures of w 7 arriors and 
statesmen were dwarfed by the grander figures of poets and phil- 
osophers. Amidst the throng of Elizabeth's ante-chamber the 
noblest form is that of the singer who laj^s the ' ' Faerie Queen ' ' 
at her feet, or the young lawyer who muses, amid the splendors 
of her presence, over the problems of the " Novum Organ on." 
The triumph of Cadiz, the conquest of Ireland, pass unheeded as 
we watch Hooker building up his ' ' Ecclesiastical Polity ' ' among 
the sheepfolds, or the genius of Shakespeare rising year by year 
into superior grandeur in a theatre beside the Thames. 



We here add another list of four old English kings, with the 
time they reigned, including the Edwards, referred to in several 
places in the course of this history. They were as follows : 

Edward I — 12 74- 1307. 

Edward II — 1 307-1 327. 

Edward III — 132 7-1 377. 

Richard II — 1377-1399. 

§ 98. Edmund Spenser. 

The glory of the new literature broke on England with Edmund 
Spenser. We know little of his life; he was born, in the year 
1552, and died in 1599, in East London, the son of poor parents, 
but linked by blood with the Spencers of Althorpe, even then — 
as he proudly says — "a house of ancient fame." He studied as 
a sizer at Cambridge, and quitted the University, while still a 
boy, to live as a tutor in the North ; but after some years of ob- 
scure poverty, the scorn of a fair ' ' Rosalind ' ' drove him again 
southwards. A college friendship with Gabriel Harvey served to 
introduce him to Lord Leicester, who sent him as his envoy to 
France, and in whose service he first became acquainted with 
Leicester's nephew, Sir Philip Sidney. From Sidney's house at 



THK PASTORAL 219 

Penhurst came his earliest work, the "Shepherd's Calendar," in 
form like Sidney's own "Arcadia:" a pastoral, where love and 
loyalty and Puritanism jostled oddly with the fancied Shepherd's 
life. The peculiar melody and profuse imagination which the 
pastoral disclosed at once placed its author in the forefront of 
living poets, but the far greater work was already in hand ; and 
from some words of Gabriel Harvey's we see Spenser bent on 
rivalling Ariosto, and hoping even to "overgo" the Orlando 
Furioso in his "Elvish Queen." 

§ 99. The Pastoral. 

The term Pastoral is the name given to a certain class of modern 
literature in which the ' ' Idyl ' ' of the Greeks and the ' ' Eclogue ' ' 
of the Latins are imitated. It was a growth of the Euphuism of 
the Renascence, and its first home was Italy. Virgil had been 
imitated even in the Middle Ages, but it was the example of 
Theocritus that was originally followed in the pastoral. As it 
appeared in Tuscany in the sixteenth century it was really a de- 
veloped eclogue or idyll, which had been expanded from a single 
scene into a drama. The first dramatic pastoral which is known 
to exist is the Tavola di Orfeo of Politian, which was presented 
at Mantua in 1472. This poem, which has been elegantly trans- 
lated by Mr. J. A. Symonds, was a tragedy, with choral pas- 
sages on an idyllic theme ; and it is perhaps too grave in tone 
to be considered as a pure piece of pastoral. It led the way more 
directly to tragedy than to pastoral, and it is the II Sacriftzio of 
Argostino Beccari, which was played in the Court of Ferrara in 
1554, that is always quoted as the first complete and actual pas- 
toral in European literature. 

In the West of Europe there were various efforts made in the 
direction of non-dramatic pastorals, which it is difficult to classify. 
Early in the fifteenth century Alexander Barclay translated the 
Latin eclogues of Mantuanus, a scholastic writer of the preceding 
age. Barnabe Googe, a generation later, in 1563, published his 
Eclogs, Epytaphes, and Sonnettes, a deliberative but not very suc- 
cessful attempt to introduce pastoral into English literature. In 
France it is difficult to deny the title of pastoral to various pro- 
ductions of poets of the Pleiade, but especially to Remy Belleau's 
pretty miscellany of prose and verse in praise of a country life, 
called La Bergerie, 1565. But the final impulse was given to the 
non-dramatic pastoral by the publication, in 1504, of the famous 



220 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Arcadia of G. Sannazaro, a work which passed through sixty 
editions before the close of the sixteenth century, and which was 
abundantly copied. Torquato Tasso followed Beccari after an in- 
terval of twenty years, and by the success of his Aminta, which 
was performed before the Court of Ferrara, in 1573, secured the 
popularity of the dramatic pastoral. Most of the existing works 
in this class may be traced back to the influence either of the 
Arcadia or of the Aminta. During the last quarter of the six- 
teenth century pastoral drama was really a power in Italy. Some 
of the best poetry of the age was written in this form, to be acted 
privately on the stage of the little court theatres that were every- 
where springing up. In a short time music was introduced and 
rapidly predominated, until the little forms of tragedy and pas- 
toral were merged in opera. 

With the reign of Elizabeth a certain tendency to pastoral was 
introduced into England. In Gascoigne and Whetstone traces 
were to be observed of a tendency towards the form and spirit of 
the eclogue. It has been conjectured that this tendency, com- 
bined with the few extant eclogues of Clement Marot to the com- 
position of what is the finest example of pastoral in the English 
language, the Shepherd's Calendar, printed in 1579. 

This famous work is divided into twelve eclogues, and is re- 
markable because of the constancy with which Spenser turns in it 
from the artificial Latin style of the pastoral, which was then pop- 
ular in Italy, and takes his inspiration direct from Theocritus. It 
is important to note that this is the first effort made in European 
literature to bring upon a pastoral stage the rustics of a modern 
country using their own peasant dialect. That Spenser's was very 
imperfectly carried out does not militate against the genuineness 
of the effort, which the very adoption of such as Willie and Cuddie, 
instead of the customary Damon and Daphnis, is enough to prove. 
Having led up to this work, which was to be confined to England, 
we return to Sannazaro 's Arcadia, which left its mark in every 
literature in Europe. This remarkable romance, which was the 
type and original of so many succeeding pastorals, is written in 
rich but laborious periods of musical prose, into which are inserted 
at frequent intervals passages of verse, contests between shep- 
herds on the "humile fistula de Coridone," or laments for the 
death of some beautiful virgin. The characters move in a world 
of supernatural and brilliant beings : they commune without sur- 
prise with ' ' i gloriose spiriti degli boschi, ' ' and reflect with singular 



THE PASTORAL 221 

completeness their author's longing for an innocent, voluptuous 
existence, with no hell nor heaven in the background. 

It was in Spain that the influence of the Arcadia made itself 
most rapidly felt outside of Italy. In France there has always 
been such a strong tendency towards a graceful sort of bucolic 
literature, that it is hard to decide what should or what should 
not be mentioned here. The charming Pastourelles of the thir- 
teenth century, with their knights on horseback and shepherdesses 
by the wayside, need not detain us further than to hint that, when 
the influence of the Italian pastoral began to be felt in France, 
these earlier lyrics gave it a national inclination. We have men- 
tioned the Bergerie of Remy Belleau, in which the art of 
Sannazaro seems to join hands with the simple sweetness of the 
mediaeval pastorella. But there was nothing in France that could 
compare with the School of Spanish pastoral writers. 

In England the movement in favor of Theocritian simplicity, 
which had been introduced by Spenser in the Shepherd's Calendar, 
was immediately defeated by the success of Sir Philip Sidney's 
Arcadia, a romance closely modelled on the masterpiece of 
Sannazaro. So far from attempting to sink to colloquial idiom 
and adopt a realism in rustic dialect, the tenor of Sidney's narra- 
tive is even more grave and stately than it is conceivable that the 
conversation of the most serious nobles can ever have been. In 
these two remarkable books, then, we have two great contempo- 
rary writers and friends, the leading men of letters of their 
generation trying their earliest flights in the region of pastoral 
poetry, and producing typical masterpieces in each of the two 
great branches of that species of poetry. Henceforward in Eng- 
land pastoral poetry took one or the other of these forms. It very 
shortly appeared, however, that the Sannazarian or Arcadian form 
was more suited to the temper of the age than the Theocritian. 

In 1583 a great impetus was given by Robert Greene, who was 
composing his Morando, and still more, in 1584, by the publica- 
tion of two pastoral dramas, the Gallachea of Lyly, and the Ar- 
raignment of Paris, of Peale. It is doubtful whether either of 
these writers knew anything about the Arcadia of Sidney, which 
was posthumously published; but Greene, at all events, became 
more imbued with the Italian spirit of the pastoral. His Mena- 
phon and Never Too Late are pure bucolic romances. While in 
the general form of his stories, however, he follows Sidney, the 
verse which he introduces is often, especially in Menaphon, exter- 



222 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

nally rustic and colloquial. In 1589 Thomas L,odge appended 
some eclogues in his Sulla's Metamorphoses, but in his Rosalynde — 
1590 — he made a much more important contribution to English 
literature in general, and to Arcadian poetry in particular. This 
beautiful and fantastic book is modelled more exactly upon the 
masterpiece of Sannazaro than any other in the language. The 
other works of Eodge scarcely come under the head of pastoral 
poetry, although his Phillis, in 1593, included some pastoral son- 
nets, and his Margarite of America, in 1596, is modelled in form 
on the Arcadia. John Dickenson printed at a date unstated, but 
probably not later than 1592, a " Passionate Eclogue," called the 
Shepherd's Complaint, which begins with a harsh burst of hexam- 
eters, but which now settles down into a harmonious prose story, 
with -lyrical interludes. In 1594 the same writer published the 
romance of Arisbus. 

Drayton is the next pastoral poet in date of publication of his 
Idea: the Shepherd's Garland bears the date of 1593, but was 
probably written much earlier. In 1595 the same poet produced 
his Eiidimion and Phebe, which was the least happy of his works. 
He then turned his fluent pen to the other branches of poetic lit- 
erature ; but after more than thirty years, at the very close of his 
life, he returned to his early love and published two pastorals : 
the Quest of Cynthia and the Shepherd's Sireyia. The general 
character of all these pieces is rich, is vague, but unimpassioned. 
The Quee?i's Arcadia of Daniel must be allowed to be open to the 
same charge, and to have been written more in accordance with a 
fashion than in following the author's predominant impulse. It 
may be added that the extreme bucolic title of Warner's first work 
Pan, his syrinx, is misleading. These prose stories have nothing 
pastoral about them. The singular eclogue by Bamfield, The 
Ajfectio?iate Shepherd, printed in 1598, is an exercise on the 
theme: "O crudelis Alexis, nihil mea carmina curas;" and in 
spite of its juvenility and indiscretion takes rank as the first really 
poetical following of Spenser and Virgil in distinction from Sidney. 
Marlow's pastoral lyric, Come Live with Me, although not printed 
till 1599, has been attributed to 1589. In 1600 was printed The 
Maid's Metamorphosis, long attributed to Eyly. 

With the close of the sixteenth century pastoral literature was 
not extinguished in England as suddenly nor as completely as it 
was in Italy and Spain. Throughout the Jacobean age the Eng- 
lish love of country life asserted itself under the guise of pastoral 



THK PASTORAL 223 

sentiment, and the influence of Tasso and Guarini was felt in 
England just when it had ceased to be active in Italy. In Eng- 
land it became the fashion to publish lyrical eclogues, usually in 
short measure, a class of poetry peculiar to the nation and to that 
age. The lighter staves of the Shepherd's Calendar were the 
model after which all these graceful productions were drawn. We 
must confine ourselves to a brief enumeration of these Jacobean 
eclogues. 

Nicholas Breton came first with his Passionate Shepherd, in 
1604; Wither followed with The Shepherd's Hunting, in 1615; 
and Braithwaite, an inferior writer, published The Poefs Willow, 
in 161 3, and Shepherds' Tales, in 1621. The mention of Wither 
must recall to our minds that of his friend William Browne, who 
published in 1613-1616 his beautiful collection of Devonshire 
eclogues called B7 r ittania's Pastorals. These were in heroic verse 
and less distinctly Spenserian in character than those eclogues 
recently mentioned. In 16 14 Browne, Wither, Christopher Brook 
and Davies of Hereford united in the composition of a little vol- 
ume of pastorals called the Shepherd's Pipe. Meanwhile the com- 
position of pastoral dramas was not entirely discontinued. In 
1606 Day dramatized part of Sidney's Arcadia in his Isle of Gulls, 
and about 1625 the Rev. Thomas Goffe composed the Careless 
Shepherdess, which Ben Jonson deigned to imitate in the opening 
lines of his Sad Shepherdess . 

In 1 6 14 Fletcher produced his Faithful Shepherdess in imitation 
of the Aminta of Tasso. This is the principal pastoral play in 
our language, and in spite of its faults and moral tone, it preserves 
a fascination which has evaporated from most of its fellows . The 
Arcadia of Milton is scarcely dramatic, but it is a bucolic ode of 
great stateliness and beauty. In the Sad Shepherdess , which was 
perhaps written about the year 1635, and in his pastoral masques 
we see Ben Jonson not disdaining to follow along the track which 
Fletcher had pointed out in the Faithful Shepherdess. With the 
" Piscatory Eclogues " of Phineas Fletcher, in 1633, we may take 
leave of the more studied forms of the Pastoral in England in the 
seventeenth century. 

In England the writing of eclogues of the sub -Spenserian class 
of Breton and Wither, led on another organization to a rich growth 
of lyrics which may roughly be called pastoral, but are not strictly 
bucolic. Carew, Lovelace, Suckling, Stanley and Cartwright are 
lyrists who all contributed to the harvest of country song, but by 



224 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

far the most copious, and the most characteristic of the pastoral 
lyrists is Herrick. He has perhaps no rival in modern literature 
in this particular direction. His command of his resources, his 
deep originality and observation, his power of concentrating his 
genius in the details of rural beauty, his interest in recording 
homely facts of country life, combined with his extraordinary gift 
of song, to place him in the very front rank among pastoral 
writers; and it is noticeable that in Herrick's hands, for the first 
time, the pastoral became a real and modern, instead of being an 
ideal and humanizing, thing. From him we date the recognition 
in poetry of the humble beauty that lies about our doors. His 
genius and influence were almost instantly obscured by the Resto- 
ration. His poetical works were printed in 1648 under the title 
of the " Hisperides." 

During the final decline of the Jacobean era a certain number 
of pastorals were still produced. Of these the ones which de- 
serves mention are three dramatic adaptations : Shirley's Arcadia, 
1640; Guarini's Pastor Fido, 1646; and Iyeonard Willan's As- 
tr<za, 1 65 1. The Restoration was extremely unfavorable to this 
species of literature. Sir Charles Sedley, Mrs. Aphra Behn, and 
Congreve published eclogues and the Pastoral Dialogues between 
Thyrsis and Strephon, the first of whom mentioned! was much ad- 
mired. All of these, however, were in the highest degree insipid 
and unreal, and partook of the extreme artificiality of the age. 

§ 100. Spenser's Fairy Queen. 
The Faerie Queene, or as we now call it, the Fairy Queen, as 
everybody knows, is an allegorical poem, and in this it differs 
from the Italian models, then talked of and famous, from the 
works of Ariosto and Tasso, as well as from those of Chaucer. 
The idea and frame -work was taken from them ; the machinery, 
like theirs, was borrowed from the days, or rather the literature, 
of chivalry ; and, like theirs, the story rolled on in stanzas ; and 
Spenser invented for his purpose a new form of stanza, one of 
nine lines instead of the eight-line one of the Italians. But, unlike 
them, Spenser avowedly designed to himself a moral purpose and 
meaning in his poem. It was not merely a brilliant and entertain- 
ing series of adventures like the Orlando. It was a poetic cele- 
bration of a great historical legend or religious epic, like the 
Gerusalemme . It professed to be a veiled exposition of moral 
philosophy. It was planned, and all its imaginate wealth unfolded, 



spenskr's fairy oueen 225 

in order to portray and recommend the virtues, and to exhibit 
philosophical speculations. It was intended to be a book, not for 
delight merely, but for instruction. 

Such a view of poetry was characteristically in harmony with 
the serious spirit of the time in England, which welcomed heartily 
all intellectual efforts, but which expected in them a purpose to do 
more than amuse, and to fashion this on its side by putting the note 
of frivolity in what did not bear this purpose distinctly in view. 
Spenser thought it right to declare to his friends, and to set down 
in writing the aim and intention of his poem. He described it as a 
a work which is in heroic verse under the title of a Faerie Queene, 
to represent all the moral virtues, assigning to every virtue a 
knight as the patron and defender of the same, in whose actions 
and feats of arms and chivalry, the operations of that virtue, 
whereof he is the protector, are to be expressed ; and the vices 
and unruly appetites, that oppose themselves against the same, to 
be beaten down or overcome. To each of the twelve virtues, every 
one embodied in a representative patron, was to be devoted a book 
of twelve cantos ; this, if well received, to be followed by the ex- 
position of twelve others, the guardians of public faith. In the 
dedication to Raleigh he tells us that the general end of the book 
is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle 
discipline. And in the person of the Fairy Queen herself he in- 
forms us : "I mean glory in my general intention, but in my par- 
ticular, I conceive the most excellent and glorious person of our 
sovereign, the Queene." 

In the legendary Arthur, the sun of the whole knightly com- 
pany, Man was to be seen perfected in his longing and progress 
toward the Fairy Queen, the divine excellence, which is the true 
end of human effort. Thus the poem maybe characterized, in its 
intent as a dream of idealism, a poem of the human soul, strug- 
gling towards the public love, which is God, and towards the 
perfect beauty, which consists not simply in harmony of color and 
form, but in the deathless Idea which shines through them. Its 
true scene is not material but mental space ; the world of picture 
and illusion, in which the actual is idealized and the ideal is real. 
In this enchanted region, two worlds are harmonized: the beauty 
of energy and the beauty of happiness ; Christian chivalry and 
pagan beauty of happiness : Olympus, mediaeval romance and 
classical mythology, the second imaginary, the first shadowy; 
16 



226 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

both poetic, each, in some way, a mutilated copy or suggestion 
of invisible force and ideas — the heaven of Plato. 

§ 101. Spensei' *s Romanticism and Classicism. 

The Romantic in the Fairy Queen predominates over the Real. 
The feudal system is no longer part and parcel of the national life : 
it has become an allegory, a philosophical ideal to be aimed at by 
every gentleman, who desires to cultivate inward perfection. 
Throughout the allegory pagan myths lie oddly jumbled together 
with mediaeval dogmas, and legendary forms are employed to cloak 
political allusions ; yet it is all somehow blended so as to seem 
natural and harmonious in the fairy land of Spenser's family. In 
spite of the Protestantism of the poet and of the nation, we feel as 
we read the splendid description of the procession of the ' ' Seven 
Deadly Sins" in the "House of Pride," how deeply Catholic 
theology had colored the English imagination, and can readily 
understand, that although much of the sense of the allegory is lost 
to the modern world, the knightly virtues of Prince Arthur pos- 
sessed a real significance for men like Sidney, Raleigh and Essex. 

The gorgeous coloring, the profuse and often complex imagery, 
which Spenser's imagination lavishes, leave no sense of confusion 
in the reader's mind. Every figure, strange as it may be, is seen 
clearly and distinctly as it passes by. It is in this calmness, this 
serenity, this spiritual elevation of the Fairy Queen, that we feel 
the new life of the coming age, moulding into order and harmoni- 
ous form the life of the Renascence. Both in its conception and 
in the way, in which this conception is realized in the portion of 
his work, which completed his poem, it strikes the note of the 
coming Puritanism. In his earlier pastoral, The Shepherd 's Calen- 
dar, the poet has boldly taken his part with the more advanced 
reformers against the Church policy of the Court. He had chosen 
Archbishop Grindal, who was then in disgrace for his Puritan 
sympathies, as his model of a Christian pastor and attacked with 
sharp invective the pomp of the higher clergy. 

The Fairy Queen in its religious theory is Puritan to the core. 
The worst foe of the ' ' Red -Cross Knight ' ' is the false and scarlet- 
clad Duessa of Rome, who parts him for awhile from Truth and 
leads him to the house of Ignorance. Spenser presses strongly 
and pitilessly for the execution of Mary Stuart. No bitter word 
ever breaks the calm of his verse save when it touches on the 
peril with which Catholicism was environing England, perils be- 



spenser's sense of beauty 227 

fore which his Knight must fall, ' 'were it not that Heaven by Grace 
doth him uphold and steadfast Truth acquite him out of all." 
But it is more in the temper and aim of his work that we catch the 
nobler and deeper tones of English Puritanism. In his earlier 
musings at Penhurst the poet had purposed to surpass Ariosto, 
but the gaiety of Ariosto 's song is utterly absent from his own. 
Not a ripple of laughter breaks the calm repose of Spenser's 
verses. He is habitually serious, and the seriousness of his poetic 
tone reflects the seriousness of his poetic purpose. 

§ 102. Spenser's Sense of Beauty. 

No poet has ever had a more exquisite sense of the Beautiful 
than Spenser. In Virgil and Tasso this was not less powerful ; 
but in fact they, even the latter himself, do not hang with such 
tenderness, with such a forgetful delay, over the fair creations of 
their fancy. Spenser is not averse to images that jar on the mind 
by existing horror or disgust, and sometimes his touches are 
rather too strong; but it is in love and beauty, in holiness and 
virtue, that he reposes with all the sympathy of his soul. 

His manner of portraying womanhood differs much from that 
of Chaucer, whom he names as his poetical master. To Chaucer 
a beautiful woman is a beautiful creature of this good earth, and 
is often nothing more : her beauty suddenly slays the tender heart 
of her lover, or she makes glad the spirit of man, as though with 
some light, bright wine. For Spenser, behind each Woman, made 
to worship or to love, rises a sacred presence — Womanhood itself. 
Her beauty of face and limb is but a manifestation of the invisible 
beauty, and this is of one kin with the divine wisdom and the 
divine love. In the poet of Edward's reign, a gay and familiar 
side of chivalry is presented, which existed in life, and in art and 
literature, along with that chivalry which was the mysticism of 
human passion. The more modern poet retains only w T hat is ex- 
alted, serious and tender, while each of the heroines of the Fairy 
Queen has distinction, so that Una little resembles Belphoebe, and 
Britomartis is far removed from Pastorella : each possesses in her 
own kind that perfection of womanhood which Coleridge praised 
and loved . When Wordsworth would name two personal themes 
gained from books — from books around which our happiness may 
twine with tendrils strong as flesh and blood — he chooses one in 
the plays of Shakespeare — Desdemona — and the second is the 
Una of Spenser. 



228 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

As Dante was drawn from heaven to heaven by the eyes of 
Beatrice, through which he could look into the far infinite, so was 
Spenser lifted away from the earthly by those of that unique 
imperishable beauty, which above all created forms a noble woman 
reveals. All the wealth of his respect and tenderness is poured 
out at the feet of his heroines. In his adoration he lifts them 
up to heights where no mortal fleck is visible. 

§ 103. Spenser's Smaller Poems. 

Of his smaller poems the ' ' Epithalamion ' ' is decidedly the 
finest, as in it he addresses his beloved immediately from the heart, 
without any intervention from allegory. Instead of the ordinary 
bridal gifts, he hallows his wife with an " Kpithalamion," fit for 
a conscious goddess ; and the ' ' savage soil of Ireland ' ' becomes 
a turf of Arcady under her feet, where the merchants' daughters of 
the town are no more at home than the angels and the four shapes 
of pagan mythology whom they meet there. The whole Epi- 
thalamion is very noble, with an organ-like roll and majesty of 
numbers, while it is instinct with the same joyousness which must 
have been the familiar mood of Spenser. 

Spenser's "Amoretti," or sonnets, eighty-eight in number, may 
he read in connection with the Epithalamion, as they give a very 
interesting history of his second courtship, which terminated in 
the marriage celebrated in that poem. 

The finest things in the Fairy Queen are : the character of Una 
in the first book ; the House of Pride ; the Cave of Mammon; the 
Cave of Despair ; the Account of Memory ; the Description of Bel- 
phcebc ; the Story of Florimel and the Witch 's Son; the Garden, 
of Adonis and Bower of Bliss; the Mark of Cupid; and Colin 
Clout's Vision, in the last book. 

§ 104. The English Drama. 

The Moralities correspond to the love for moral allegory, which 
manifests itself in so many periods of English Literature, and 
which, while dominating the whole field of mediaeval literature, 
was no more assiduously and effectually cultivated than in England. 
It is necessary to bear this in mind in order to understand what 
to us seems so strange, the popularity of the Moral Plays; which 
indeed never equalled those of the Miracles, but sufficed to maintain 
the former species till it received a fresh impulse from that con- 
nection established between it and the New Learning, together 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA 229 

with the new political and religious ideas and questions of the 
Reformation Age. 

Moreover, a specially popular element was supplied to these 
plays, which in manner of representation differed in no essential 
point from the Miracles, in a character borrowed from the latter; 
and, in the Moralities, usually provided with a companion, whose 
task it was to lighten the weight of such abstractions as Sapience 
and Justice. These were the Devil and his attendant, Vice ; of 
which the latter seems to have been of native origin ; and as he 
was usually dressed in a fool's habit, was probably suggested by 
the familiar custom of keeping an attendant fool at court or in the 
great houses. The Vice had many aliases : Shift, Ambidexter, 
Sin, Fraud, Iniquity, and so on; but his usual duty is to torment 
and tease the Devil, his master, for the edification and diversion of 
the audience. He was gradually blended with the domestic Fool, 
who survived in the regular drama. 

The earlier English Moralities — from the reign of Henry VI to 
Henry VII — usually allegorize the conflict between good and 
evil in the mind and life of man, without any side intention of theo- 
logical controversy. And such is still essentially the purpose of 
the Morality we possess in Henry the Eighth's poet, the witty 
Skelton ; and of still another, perhaps the most perfect of its 
class, which in date is already later than the Reformation. But 
if such theology as Every Man teaches is the orthodox doctrine 
of Rome, its successor, R. Wever's Lzisty Juventas, breathes the 
•spirit of the dogmatic Reformation of the reign of Edward VI. 
Theological controversy largely occupies the Moralities of the 
earlier part of Elizabeth's reign and connects itself with political 
feeling in a famous Morality — Sir David Lindsay's Satire, Kittie 's 
Confession, which was written on the other side of the Border, when 
such efforts as the religious drama had made had been extin- 
guished by the Reformation. Only a single English Morality 
Play proper remains to us which belongs to the reign of Queen 
Elizabeth ; yet there is another series which connects itself with 
the ideas of the Renascence rather than the Reformation, treating 
of intellectual progress rather than of moral conduct. These 
extend from the reign of Henry VIII to that of his younger 
daughter. 

The transition from the Morality to the regular Drama in Eng- 
land was affected on the one hand by the intermixture of histori- 
cal personages with abstractions — as Bishop Bale's ' ' Kyng John ' ' 



230 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

— in 1548 — which easily led over to the Chronicle History; on the 
other hand, by the introduction of types of real life by the side of 
abstract figures. This latter tendency, of which instances occur 
in earlier plays, is observable in several of the sixteenth century 
Moralities; but before most of them were written, a further step 
in advance had been taken by a man of genius, John Hey wood — 
beginning about 152 1 — whose Interludes were short farces in the 
French fashion, dealing entirely with real — very real — men and 
women. Orthodox and conservative, he had at the same time a 
keen eye for the vices as well as for the follies of his age, and not 
the least for those of the clerical profession. Other writers, such 
as T. Inglehand, took the same direction; and the allegory of 
abstractions was thus undermined on the stage ; very much as in 
didactic literature the ground had been cut from under its feet by 
the Ship of Fooles. Thus the Interludes — a name which had been 
used for the Moralities themselves from an early date — facilitated 
the advent of Comedy, without having superseded the earlier form. 
But the Moralities and Miracle plays survived into the Elizabethan 
age, after the drama had already begun its course. 

It must not, however, be forgotten that from an early period in 
England as elsewhere had flourished a species of entertainments , 
not properly speaking dramatic, but largely contributing to form 
a taste for dramatic spectacles. The Pageants, as they were 
called, were the successors of the Ridings, from which Chaucer's 
apprentice could not keep away ; but they had advanced under 
Flemish and other foreign examples. Costumed figures repre- 
sented before gathered citizens the heroes of mythology and his- 
tory, and the abstractions of moral, patriotic, or musical alle- 
gory ; and the city of London clung with special fervor to these 
exhibitions, which the Elizabethan drama was neither able nor 
willing to oust from the popular favor. Some of the greatest and 
some of the least of English dramatists were the ministers of 
pageantry. 

The literary influence, which finally transformed the growths 
noticed above into the national dramas of the several countries of 
Europe, was, in a word, the influence of the Renascence. Among 
the remains of classical antiquity which were studied, translated, 
and imitated, those of the drama necessarily held a prominent 
place. Never altogether lost sight of, they now became subjects 
of devoted research, and models for faithful copies : first in one 
of their own, then in modern tongues; and essentially literary 






THp; ENGLISH DRAMA 231 

endeavors came into more or less direct contact with, and acquired 
more or less control over the already existing entertainments of 
the stage. Thus the stream of the Modern Drama, whose, source 
and contributories have been described, was brought back into the 
ancient bed, from which its flow diverged into a number of rational 
courses, unequal in impetus and strength, and varying in accord- 
ance with the manifold conditions of their progress. 

The priority in this, as in most other aspects of the Renascence, 
belongs to Italy. In ultimate achievements the Italian drama fell 
short of the fulness of the results obtained elsewhere — a surpris- 
ing fact when it is considered not only that the Italian language 
had the vantage ground of closest relationship to the Latin, but 
that the genius of the Italian people has at all times inspired it 
with a predilection for the drama. The cause is doubtless to be 
sought in the absence in Italian life during a long period, and 
more especially of that contemporary with the rise and earlier 
promise of Italian dramatic literature, of those loftiest and most 
potent impulses of popular feeling, to which a national drama 
owes so much of its strength. This absence was due partly to 
the peculiarities of the Italian character ; partty to the political 
and ecclesiastical experiences which Italy was fated to undergo. 

The Italians were strangers to the enthusiasm of patriotism, 
which was the breath of the nostrils of the Elizabethan age, as 
well as to the single-minded religiosity which identified Spain 
with the spirit of the Catholic Revival. The clearsightedness of 
the Italians had something to do with this — for they were too in- 
telligent to believe in their tyrants, and too free from illusions to 
deliver up their minds to their priests. The chilling and enerva- 
ting effects of the pressure of foreign domination, such as no 
Western people with a history and a civilization like those of Italy 
had ever experienced, did the rest ; and for many generations ren- 
dered impotent the higher efforts of the dramatic art among the 
Italians. 

Among the nations of German descent, but one, the English, 
succeeded under the influence of the Renascence movement in 
transforming the last growths of the mediaeval drama into the 
beginnings of a great and enduring national dramatic literature. 
This transformation connects itself with one of the greatest 
epochs of the national history, or, more properly speaking, forms 
a part of it. The Elizabethan drama and Elizabethan age are, it 
is no exaggeration to assert, equally inconceivable the one without 
the other. 



232 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

It has been seen how already in the reign of Edward VI, the 
breath of a new age with its ' ' New Learning ' ' had quickened 
the relatively inanimate species of the Morality into the first 
Chroyiicle History — still intermingled with remnants of the earlier 
species — and how, even at an earlier date, John Heywood's Inter- 
ludes had bridged the distance separating, from only partially re- 
lieved abstractions, the concrete directness of Comedy proper. 
Soon afterwards the study and imitation of the ancient classical 
drama were introduced into the English World of Letters ; and 
under their influence Tragedy and Comedy, which might other- 
wise from the first coalesced, were in their early growth in English 
literature kept asunder, though not absolutely so. 

Already in Queen Mary's reign, translating was found to be the 
readiest form of expression offering itself to literary scholarship, 
and Italian examples helped to commend Seneca, the most modern 
of the ancient tragedians, as a favorite author of such exercises. 
With the year of Elizabeth's accession began a series of transla- 
tion of his plays by Jasper Hey wood — John Heywood's son- — and 
others, and to the direct influence of one of Seneca's tragedies — 
the Thebais — is to be ascribed the composition of the first tragedy 
proper in the English tongue, the Gorboduc, afterwards renamed 
Ferrex and Porrex — of Thomas Sackville, that is, Lord Buck- 
hurst, with whom Thomas Norton was joint author, in 1561. 

Though unlike Gorboduc, classical in theme, and in some respects 
approaching nearer to the true conception of tragedy in their treat- 
ment of dramatic passion, the nearly contemporary Appius and 
Virginius — 1563 — and Preston's Cambises, King of Percia, in the 
roughness of their form, more closely resemble the old religious 
drama. Simultaneously with the influence, directly or indirectly 
exercised, of classical literature, that of the Italian, both dramatic 
and narrative, asserted itself. Early works from this source were 
Romeo and Juliet — not preserved, but apparently anterior to Gor- 
boduc, Tancred and Gismunda, in 1563, and G. Whetstone's Pro- 
mos and Casa?idra, 1578, from which Shakespeare took the story 
of Measure Jor Measure. 

From the double danger which threatened the English tragic 
drama in the days of its infancy — that it might congeal in the 
old heights of classical themes, or dissolve in vigor in the glow- 
ing heat of a passion fiercer than that of the Italians — Inglese 
Italianato e tin diavalo incarnato — it was preserved, more than by 
any other cause, by its happy association with the traditions of 






THE ENGLISH DRAMA 233 

its national history. The crude growth of the Chronicle history- 
proved strong enough to assert itself by the side of Tragedy, based 
on classical and Italian models ; and in a series of works of more 
or less uncertain dates, a vein was worked by which Shakespeare 
was to draw the rich ore. Amid these rude compositions which 
intermixed the blank verse, introduced by Gorboduc, with prose, 
and freely mingled tragic with comic elements — works half epic, 
half dramatic, and popular in form, but national in theme — are 
The Famous Victories of Henry V, acted before 1588; The Trou- 
blesome Raigne of King folm, printed in 1591 ; and The Chronicle 
of King Lear, acted in 1593. A still further step in advance was 
taken in what really deserves the title of The Tragedy of Sir 
Thomas More — 1590 — not so much on account of the relative 
nearness of the subject to the time of its treatment as because of 
the tragic responsibility of the character here already worked out. 

Such had been the beginnings of Tragedy in England up to the 
time when the geniuses, worthy to be called the predecessors of 
Shakespeare, under the influence of a created literary epoch, 
seized the form ready to their hands. 

The birth of Comedy, at all times a process of less labor, had 
slightly preceded that of Tragedy in the history of the English 
Drama. Isolated Latin comedies had been produced in the origi- 
nal or in English versions or reproductions as early as the reign 
of Henry VIII, and the Morality and its descendant, the Interlude, 
pointed the way towards nationalizing and popularizing types, 
equally fitted to divert Roman, Italian and English audiences. 

Thus the earliest extant English comedy, Nicholas Udall's 
Ralph Roister Doister, which cannot be dated later than 1552, 
may be described as a genuinely English adaptation of Plautus, 
while its successor, Gammer Gurton's Needle, printed in 1575, 
and probably written by Bishop Still, has an original, and in con- 
sequence a slighter, but by no means unamusing plot. In the 
main, however, the early English Comedy, while occasionally in- 
troducing character of genuine native origin, and appealing to 
the traditional humors of Will Sumnor, the court fool of Henry 
VIII, or Grim, the Collier of Croydon, was content to borrow its 
themes from Italian sources. Ariosto's / Suppositi found a trans- 
lator in Gascoigne — 1556 ; and the Me?iaechmi of Plautus, transla- 
tors or imitators or writers of later dates. While on the one hand, 
the mixture of tragic and comic motives was clearly leading in the 
direction of tragi -comedy ; on the other hand the precedent of 



234 , ENGLISH LITERATURE 

the Italian Pastoral Comedy, the introduction of figures and 
stories from classical mythology, and the rapid and versatile in- 
fluence of Italian comedy seemed likely to control the progress of 
the lighter branch of the English Drama. 

Out of such promises as these the glories of the English Drama 
were ripened by the warmth and light of the great Elizabethan 
age, of which the beginnings may fairly be reckoned from the 
third decennium of the reign to which it owes its name. 

§ 105. Shakespeare 's Predecessors. 

Among Shakespeare's predecessors, John I^yly — 1 554-1 606 — 
whose plays were all written for the chapel and the children of 
St. Paul's, holds a position apart in English dramatic literature. 
The Euphuism, to which his famous romance gave its name, like- 
wise distinguished his mythological, quasi-historical, allegorical 
and satirical comedies. But his real service to the progress of 
the English drama is to be sought neither in the choice of sub- 
jects, nor in his imagery — though to his fondness for fairy-lore 
and to the whole phantasmagoria of legend, classical as well as 
romantic, his contemporaries, and Shakespeare in particular, 
were indebted for a stimulative precedent. It lies in his adoption 
of Gascoigne's innovation of writing plays in prose ; and, although 
under the fetters of an affected and vicious style, he had given 
the first example of a brisk and vivacious dialogue, an example 
to which even such writers as Shakespeare and Jonson were in- 
debted. 

The author of the Spanish Tragedy, Thomas Kyd, in the latter 
half of the sixteenth century, possesses some of the characteris- 
tics but none of the genius of the great tragic dramatist, who 
preceded Shakespeare. No slighter tribute than this is assuredly 
due to Christopher Marlowe — 1 564-1 593 — whose violent end pre- 
maturely closed a poetical career of dazzling brilliancy. His 
earliest play, Tamburlai?ie the Great, in which the English use of 
blank verse was introduced upon the English public stage, while 
full of the ' ' high astounding terms " of an extravagant and often 
bombastic diction, is already marked by the passion which was 
the poet's most characteristic feature, and which was to find ex- 
pression so luxuriant in his Doctor Eaustus, and so surprisingly 
violent in his Jew of Malta. His masterpiece, Edward II, is a 
tragedy of singular pathos and of a dramatic power that was un- 
approachable to any of his compeers. George Peele — 1 558-1 598 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 235 

— was a far more versatile writer, even as a dramatist, but, though 
his plays contain passages of exquisite beauty, not one of them is 
worthy to be ranked by the side of Marlow's Edward II, com- 
pared with which, however, Peele's Chro?iicle History of Edward I , 
still stands on a level of the species to which its title and charac- 
ter alike assign it. His first play is undoubtedly David and Beth- 
sabe, which resembles Edward I in construction, but far surpasses 
it in beauty of language and versification, besides treating its sub- 
ject with greater superior dignity. If the difference between 
Peele and Shakespeare is still in many respects besides that of 
genius, an immeasurable one, we seem to come into something 
like a Shakespearian atmosphere in more than one passage of the 
unfortunate Robert Greene — 1560-1592 — unfortunate perhaps in 
nothing more than in his notorious enmity to Shakespeare him- 
self. 

His genius, which shone most brightly in plays treating of Eng- 
lish life and scenes, was in the main, free from the pedantry which 
occasionally besets the flight of Peele's and even of Marlow's 
muse ; and his most delightful work — Friar Bacon and Friar 
Bungay, at all events seems to breathe something of that inde- 
scribable freshness, which we recognize, if not as a particular 
Shakespearian characteristic, at least as one belonging to none but 
a truly national art. Thomas Lodge — 1 558-1 625, Thomas Nash 
the redoubtable pamphleteer — 15 64- 160 2, Henry Chettle — 1564- 
1667, who worked the chords both of pity and terror with equal 
vigor, in Patient Grissle, Hoffman, who wrote A Revenge for a 
Father, and Anthony Munday — 1553-1633, better remembered for 
his city pageants than for his plays, are among other more gen- 
erally known writers of the early Elizabethan English drama, 
though not all of them can strictly be called the predecessors of 
Shakespeare. 

§ 106. William Shakespeare — 1564.-1616. 
This period of English drama, though it is far from being one 
of crude effort, was not yet one of full consummation. In tragedy 
the advance which had been made in the choice of great themes, 
in knitting closer the connection between the theatre and the 
national history, in vindicating to passion its rights to adequate 
expression, was already enormous. In comedy the advance had 
been less decisive and less independent. Much had been gained 
in reaching greater freedom of form, and something in enlarging 
the range of the subject, but artificiality had proved a snare in one 



236 KNGLISH LITERATURE 

direction, while the license of the comic stage, upheld by favorite 
" clowns" such as Kemp or Tarleton, had not succumbed before 
more exacting demands. The way of escaping the dilemma had, 
however, been already recognized to be in the construction of 
suitable. plots, for which a full storehouse was open in the popular 
traditions, preserved national ballads, and the growing literature 
of translated foreign fiction, or in native imitations of it. Mean- 
while the aberration of the comic stage to political and religious 
controversy, which it could never hope to treat with real freedom 
in a country provided with a strong monarchy and a dogmatic 
religion , seemed likely to extinguish the promise of the beginning 
of English Romantic Comedy. 

These were the circumstances under which the greatest of 
dramatists began to devote his genius to the theatre. Shakespeare's 
career as a writer of plays can have differed little in its beginnings 
from those of his contemporaries and rivals. Before or while he 
was proceeding from the retouching and rewriting of the plays of 
others to original dramatic composition, the most gifted of those 
we have termed his predecessors had passed away. He had been 
decried as an actor before he was known as an author, and after 
living through days of darkness for the theatre, if not for himself, 
attained, before the close of the century, the beginning of his 
prosperity and the beginning of his fame. But if we call him 
fortunate, it is not because of such rewards as these. 

As a poet, Shakespeare was no doubt happy in his times, which 
intensified the national character, expanded the national mind, and 
were such as to add their stimulus even to such a creative power 
as his. He was happy in the antecedents of the form of literature 
which commended itself to his choice, and in the opportunities 
which it offered in so many directions for an advance to heights 
yet undiscovered and unknown. What he actually accomplished 
was due to his genius, whose achievements are immeasurable, like 
itself. His influence upon the progress of the English national 
drama divides itself into two very unequal proportions, into a 
direct and indirect one. To the former alone can reference here 
be made. 

Already the first editors of Shakespeare's works in a collected 
form recognized so marked a distinction between his plays, taken 
from English history and those treating of other historical sub- 
jects, whether ancient or modern, that, whilst they included this 
latter among the tragedies at large, they grouped the former 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 237 

as histories by themselves. These histories are in their literary- 
genesis a development of the chronicle histories of Shakespeare's 
predecessors and contemporaries, the taste for which had greatly- 
increased towards the beginning of his own career as a dramatist, 
under influences naturally connecting themselves with the general 
current of national life and sentiment in this epoch. Though it 
cannot be argued that he composed his several dramas from 
English history in the sequence of this chronology of their themes, 
his genius gave to their entire series an inner harmony, which has 
not unnaturally inspired commentators with the wish to prove a 
symmetrically constructed whole. 

He thus brought the peculiarly national species to a perfection 
which made it difficult, if not impossible, for his later contempo- 
raries and successors to add to it more than an occasional supple- 
ment. None of them were found able to add to it more than an 
occasional supplement. None of them were found ready to take 
up the thread where Shakespeare left it, after perfunctorily attach- 
ing the pre=ent to the past — probably not all his own — which 
must be regarded as the end rather than the crown of the series of 
histories . But to furnish such supplements accorded little with 
the tastes and tendencies of the later Elizabethans ; and with the 
exception of an isolated work — Ford's Chronicle History of Per- 
kin Warbeck — the natural historical drama in Shakespeare reached 
at once its perfection and its close. The ruder form of the chronicle 
history survived for a time the advance made upon it; but the 
efforts in this field of Heywood's Edward IV; When You See Me, 
You Know Me, of Rowley and others, in a literary point of view, 
are anachronisms. 

Of Shakespeare's other plays the several groups exercised a 
more direct influence upon the general English dramatic literature 
of the day. His Roman tragedies, though following their author- 
ities with much the same fidelity as that of the English histories, 
even more effectively taught the great lesson of free dramatic 
treatment of historic themes, and thus preeminently the perennial 
models of the modern historic drama. His tragedies on other 
themes, which necessarily admitted of a more absolute freedom of 
treatment, established themselves as the examples for all times of 
the highest kind of tragedy. Where else is exhibited with the 
same fulness the struggle between will and obstacle, the character 
and circumstance ? Where else is mirrored forth with equal power 
and variety the working of those passions in the mastery of which 
over man lies his doom ? 



238 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Here, above all, Shakespeare, as compared with his predecessors 
as well as his successors, is "that nature which they paint and 
draw." He threw open to modern tragedy a range of hitherto un- 
known breadth and depth and height, and emancipated the national 
drama in its noblest forms from limits to which it could never 
again restrict itself, without a consciousness of its having re- 
nounced its enfranchisement. Happily for the variety of his 
creative genius on the English stage, no divorce had been pro- 
claimed between the serious and the comic ; and no division of 
species had been established, which he ridicules as pedantic, when 
it expresses itself to be exhaustive. The comedies of Shakespeare 
accordingly refuse to be tabulated in deference to any method of 
classification deserving to be called precise ; and several of them 
are comedies, only according to a technical use of the term. In 
those in which the comic interest asserts itself to the instinct of 
the reader or spectator as supreme, it is still of its nature inciden- 
tal to the progress of the action ; for it seems a just criticism — and 
one agreeing with what we can conclude as to Shakespeare's pro- 
cess of construction — that all his comedies but one — The Merry 
Wives of Windsor — are both in design and effect comedies of 
character proper. Thus in this direction, while the unparalleled 
wealth of his invention renewed or created a whole gallery of types, 
he left much to be done by his successors ; while the truest secrets 
of his comic art, which interweaves fancy and observation, draws 
wisdom from the lips of fools, and imbues with character what all 
hands would have left shadow}", monstrous, or trivial, are among 
the things inimitable, belonging to the individuality of his poetic 

genius. 

§ 107. Shakespeare 's Style and Influence. 

The influence of Shakespeare's diction and versification upon 
that of the English drama in general can hardly be overrated, 
though it would be next to impossible to state it definitely. 
In these points Shakespeare as a writer was progressive ; and this 
progress has been deemed sufficiently well traceable in his plays, 
to be used as an aid in seeking to determine their chronological 
sequence. The general laws of this progress accord with those 
of the natural advance of creative genius ; artificiality gives way 
to freedom, and freedom in its turn submits to a greater degree 
of regularity and care. 

In versification, as in diction, during the earliest and the latest 
period, Shakespeare's dramatic writings are more easily recog- 



shakespkare's method of construction 239 

nizable than what lies between and what may be called the normal 
period, the plays belonging to which in form most resemble one 
another, and are least affected by distinguishable peculiarities — 
such as the rhymes and intentionally Euphuistic coloring of 
style, which characterize the earliest, or the feminine endings of 
the lines, and the more condensed manner of expression common 
to the latest plays. However, such distinctions apart, there can 
be no doubt but, that in verse and in prose alike, Shakespeare's 
style, so far as it admitted of reproduction, is itself to be regarded 
as the norm of that of the Elizabethan Drama : that in it the 
prose form of English Comedy possesses its first accepted model ; 
and that in it the chosen metre of the English versified drama es- 
tablished itself as immovable, unless at the risk of an unnatural 
experiment. 

§ 108. Shakespeare 's Method of Construction. 

The great and irresistible demand on the part of Shakespeare's 
public was for incident — a demand which of itself necessitated a 
method of construction different from that of the Greek drama, 
or of those modelled more or less closely upon it. To no other 
reason is to be ascribed the circumstance, that he so constantly 
combined two actions in the course of a single play, not merely 
supplementing the one by means of the other as a by or wider 
plot. In no respect is the progress of his technical skill as a 
dramatist more apparent — an assertion, which a comparison of 
plays, clearly ascribable to successive periods of his life, would 
satisfactorily establish. 

§ 109. Shakespeare's Characters. 

Should it, however, be sought to express in one word the great- 
est debt which the Drama owes to Shakespeare, this word must be 
the same as that which expresses his supreme gift as a dramatist. 
It is in characterization, in the drawing of characters — ranging 
through almost every type of humanity which furnishes a fit sub- 
ject for the tragic or the comic art — that he remains absolutely 
unapproached ; and it was in this direction that he pointed the way 
which English drama could not desert without becoming untrue 
to itself. It may have been a mere error of judgment, which 
afterwards held him to have been surpassed by others in particular 
fields of characterization — which, forsooth, were regarded as su- 
premely excellent in male but not female characters. Still it was 



240 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

a sure sign of decay when English writers began to shrink from 
following him in the endeavor to make the drama a mirror of 
humanity; and when in self-condemned arrogance they thrust un- 
reality back upon a stage which had been animated with the warm 
breath of life, where Juliet had blossomed like a flower of spring, 
and where Othello's noble nature had suffered and smned. 

§ 110. Forms of the Later Elizabethan Drama. 

By the numerous body of poets who, contemporary with Shakes- 
peare or in the next generation, cultivated the wide field of the 
national drama, every form commending itself to the tastes and 
sympathies of the national genius was essayed. None were ne- 
glected except those in which the spirit of English literature had 
been estranged by the Reformation, and those which have been 
from the first artificial importations of the Renascence. The 
mystery could not here as in Spain produce such an aftergrowth 
as the Autos, and the confines of the religious drama were only 
now and then tentatively touched, as by Massinger in the Virgin 
Martyr, or by Shirley in St. Patrick for Irela?id. The direct imi- 
tations of the classical drama were few and feeble. At the oppo- 
site end of the dramatic scale, the light of gaiety in the Italian 
and French forces could not establish itself on the English popular 
stage without more solid adjuncts: the Englishman's festive 
digestion is robust and he likes his amusements substantial. In 
the Pastoral Drama and the Mask, however, many English 
dramatists found special opportunities for the exercise of their 
lyrical gifts and their inventive powers. The former could never 
become other than an exotic, so long as it retained the artificial 
character of its origin. Shakespeare had accordingly only blended 
elements derived from it into the action of his Romantic Comedies. 

In more or less isolated works, Jonson, as in The Sad Shepherdess, 
Fletcher, Daniel, Randolph and others, sought to rival Tasso, 
Jonson coming nearest to nationalizing an essentially foreign 
growth by the fresh simplicity of his treatment. Fletcher bear- 
ing away the palm for beauty and poetic execution — as in The 
Faithful Shepherdess. The Mask was a more elastic kind of com- 
position, mixing in various proportions its constituent elements 
of declamation and dialogue, music and dancing, decoration and 
scenery. In its least elaborate literary form — which, of course, 
externally, was the most elaborate — it closely approached the 
Pageant; in other instances, the distinctness of its character or 






THE LATER ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 241 

the fulness of the action introduced into its scheme, brought it 
nearer to the regular drama. A frequent ornament of Queen 
Elizabeth's progresses, it was cultivated with increased assiduity 
in the reign of James I ; and in that of his successor, it outshone, 
by the favor it enjoyed at court with the nobility, the attractions 
of the regular drama itself. Most of the later Elizabethan dra- 
matists contributed this species, upon which Shakespeare only in- 
cidentally in the course of his dramas expended the resources of 
his fancy ; but by far the most successful composer of Masks was 
Ben Johnson, whose numerous compositions of this kind 
hold a permanent place in English literature, and "next whom," 
in his own judgment, only Fletcher and Chapman could write a 
"Mask." Inasmuch, however, as the history of the Mask in 
England is to a great extent that of ' ' painting and carpentry, ' ' and 
of Inigo Jones, it need not here be further pursued. The "Micro- 
cosmus" of T. Nabbes — 1632 — which is very likely a Morality, 
seems to have been the first Mask brought upon the public stage. 
It was the performance of a Mask by Queen Henrietta Maria and 
her ladies at Whitehall, which had some years previously been 
thought — 1632 — to have supplied to the invective of His trio Mas- 
tix against the stage the occasion for disloyal innuendo ; and it was 
for the performance of a Mask in a great nobleman's castle that a 
very different Puritan had not long afterwards — 1634 — composed 
one of the loftiest and loveliest English poems. Comus has been 
judged and condemned as a drama — unjustly — for the dramatic 
qualities of a Mask are not essential to the species ; nor need its 
histoty in England be referred to were it not so inseparably con- 
nected with that of the Elizabethan drama. In later times the 
Mask was brought into the opera, or continued an humble life of 
its own, apart from contact with a higher literary effort. It is 
strange that later English poets should have done so little to 
restore to its nobler uses, and to invest with new significance, a 
form of so improved a flexibility as the poetic Mask. 

§ 111. The Later Elizabethan Drama. 
The annals of the English Drama proper, in the period, reaching 
from the closing years of Elizabeth to the outbreak of the great 
Revolution, include, together with numerous relatively insignifi- 
cant, many illustrious poets in the history of English literature. 
Among Shakespeare's contemporaries and successors there is, how- 
ever, but one who by the energy of his genius, not less than by the 
17 



242 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

circumstances of his literary career, stands in a position of undis- 
puted primacy among his fellows. Benjami?i Jonson, or as he is 
usually styled, Ben Jonso?i — 1573-163 7 — to whom in his latter days 
a whole generation of writers paid homage as to their veteran chief, 
was alone in full truth the founder of a school, a family of drama- 
tists. Yet his preeminence did not, whatever he and his followers 
may have thought, extend to both branches of the regular drama. 
In tragedy he fell short of the highest success : the weight of his 
learning lay too heavily upon his efforts to draw from deeper 
sources than those which had sufficed for Shakespeare. Such as 
they are, his tragic works — Sejamis, His Fall, and Cataline, His 
Conspiracy — stand almost, although not quite, alone in this 
period as examples of sustained effort in historic tragedy proper. 

With the great body of the English dramatists of this and the 
next period, tragedy had passed into a phase where its interests 
depended mainly upon plot and incident. The romantic tragedies 
and the tragi-comedies, which fill the literature of this period, 
constitute a growth, at first sight, of astonishing exuberance ; and 
in mere externals of themes, ranging from Byzantium to ancient 
Britain, and from the Caesars of ancient Rome to the tyrants of 
the Renascence, of equally astonishing variety. The sources from 
which these subjects were derived had been continually on the 
increase. 

Besides Italian, Spanish and French fiction, original and trans- 
lated, besides British legend in its romance dress, and English Fic- 
tion in its humbler and its more ambitious and artificial form, the 
contemporary foreign drama, especially the Spanish, offered oppor- 
tunities for resort. And, in addition to these materials, a new 
field of resources was on hand, since the English dramatist had 
begun to regard events and episodes of English domestic life as 
fit subjects for tragic treatment. Domestic tragedy of this descrip- 
tion was, indeed, no novelty on the English stage ; Shakespeare him- 
self may have touched, with his master-hand, more than one effort 
of this kind, such as Arden of Favers/iam , in 1592, A Yorkshire 
Tragedy, an event which occurred in 1604; but Hey wood — 1570- 
1 605 — may be regarded as the first who achieved any work of con- 
siderable literary value in this class of literature, of which A Woma?i 
Killed with Kindness, is an instance to which some of the plays 
of Thomas Dekker — 1 570-1 640 — T. Middleton and others more or 
less belong. Yet in contrast to this wide variety of sources and 
consequent apparent variety of themes, the number of motives em- 



THE LATER ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 243 

ployed — at least as a rule — in the tragic drama of this period was 
comparatively small and limited. 

Hence it is that notwithstanding the diversity of subjects among 
the tragic dramas of such men as Marston, Webster, Fletcher, 
Ford and Shirley, an impression of sameness is left us by a con- 
nected perusal of these works. Politic ambition, conjugal jeal- 
ousy, absolute female devotion, unbridled, masculine passion, such 
are the motives which constantly recur in the Decameron of the 
later Elizabethan drama. And this impression is heightened by 
the want of moderation, by the excess of passion, which these 
dramatists so habitually exhibit in the treatment of their favorite 
themes. All the tragic poets of this period are not equally amen- 
able to this charge. In J. Webster — 1 586-1 650 — see Duchess of 
Malfi — master as he is of the effects of the horrible ; and in J. 
Ford — see his 'Tis Pity She's a Whore and The Broken Heart — 
1 586-1 640 — surpassingly seductive in his sweetness, the monotony 
of exaggerated passion is broken by those marvellously sudden 
and subtle touches through which their tragic genius creates its 
most thrilling effects. Nor will the tendency to excess of passion, 
which F. Beaumont — 1586-1616 — and J. Fletcher — 1579-1625 — 
undoubtedly exhibit, be confounded with their distinctive power 
of sustaining tenderly pathetic characters and situations in a de- 
gree unequalled by any of their contemporaries ; a power seconded 
by beauty of diction and softness of versification , which for a time 
raised them to the highest pinnacle of popularity, and which en- 
titles them in their conjunction, and Fletcher as an independent 
worker, to an enduring permanence among their fellows. 

In their morals Beaumont and Fletcher are not above the level 
of their age. The manliness of sentiment, which ennobles the 
rhetorical genius of P. Massinger — 15 84- 1640 — and the gift of 
poetic illustration, which entitles J. Shirley — 1595-1666 — to be 
remembered as something besides the latest and the most fertile 
of this group of dramatists, have less a direct bearing upon the gen- 
eral character of the tragic art of the period. The common feat- 
ures of the romantic tragedy of this age are sufficiently marked, 
but not capable of obscuring the distinctive features in its indi- 
vidual writers, which it is the highest function of criticism to 
discover and establish. 

In Comedy, on the other hand, the genius and insight of Jonson 
pointed the way to a steady and legitimate advance. His theory 
of ' ' Humours ' ' — which found the most palpable expression in two 



244 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

of his earliest plays — in Every Man in His Humour and Every 
Man Out of His Humour — if translated into ordinary language of 
character art, signifies the paramount importance in the comic 
drama of the creation of distinctive human types. In the actual, 
'creation of these it was impossible that Jonson should excel Shakes- 
peare ; but in the consciousness with which he recognized and in- 
dicated the highest sphere of a comic dramatist's labors, he ren- 
dered to the drama a direct service, which Shakespeare had left 
unperformed. By the rest of his contemporaries and successors, 
some of whom, such as Brome, were content avowedly to follow 
his footsteps, Jonson was only occasionally rivalled by individual 
instances ol comic creations ; in the entirety of its achievements, 
his genius remained unapproached. The favorite types of Jonso- 
nian comedy, to which Dekker, J. Marston — 1 575-1 624 — and 
Chapman had, though to no large extent, added others of their 
own, were elaborated with incessant zeal and remarkable effect by 
their contemporaries and successors . 

It was after a very different fashion from that, in which Roman 
comedians reiterated the ordinary types of the new Attic Comedy, 
that the inexhaustible verve of T. Middleton — 1 575-1 624 — the 
buoyant productivity of Fletcher, the observant humor of N» 
Field, and the artistic versatility of Shirley — not to mention many 
later and lesser names — mirrored in innumerable pictures of con- 
temporary life the undying follies and foibles of mankind. As, 
comedians of manners more than one of these surpassed the old 
master, not in distinctness and correctness — the fruits of the most 
painstaking genius that ever fitted a learned sock to the living 
realities of life — but in a lightness which did not impair their 
sureness of touch; while in the construction of plots, the access 
of abundant new materials, and the greater elasticity of treatment, 
which is the result of accumulated experience, enabled them to 
maintain a steady progress. The English comic dramatic litera- 
ture from Jonson to Shirley is unsurpassed as a comedy of man- 
ners, while as a comedy of character it at least defies comparison 
with any other national literary growth preceding it or contempo- 
rary with it. 

§ 112. The Later Elizabethan Stage maintains its Level. 

The rivals against which, in its later closing period, the old 
English drama had to contend, have been already noticed. From 
the Masks and the Triumphs at court and at the houses of the 



THK DRAMA AND PURITANISM 245 

nobility, with their Olympuses built by Inigo Jones, and filled 
with goddesses and nymphs, clad in the gorgeous costumes de- 
signed by his inventive hand, to the city pageants and shows by 
land and water ; from the tilts and tournaments at Whitehall to 
the more philosophical devices at the Inns at Court and the Aca- 
demical plays at the Universities ; down even to the brief but 
thrilling theatrical excitements of ' ' Bartholomew Fair, ' ' and the 
* ' Ninevitical Motions ' ' of the puppets ; in all these ways the 
Various sections of the theatrical public were tempted aside. 
Foreign performers, French and Spanish actors — and even French 
actresses — paid visits to London. But the national drama held 
its ground. The art of acting maintained itself at least on the 
level to which it had been brought by Shakespeare's associates and 
contemporaries . 

The profession of an actor came to be more generally than of 
old separated from that of playwright, though both still, as in 
the case of Field, occasionally combined. But this rather led to 
an increased appreciation of artistic merit in actors who valued 
the dignity of their own profession, and whose cooperation the 
authors learned to esteem as of independent significance. The 
stage was purged from the barbarism of the old school of clowns. 
Women's parts were still acted by boys, many of whom attained 
to considerable celebrity; and a practice was thus continued, 
which pleased the English theatre at a considerable disadvantage 
as compared with the Spanish, where it never obtained, and which 
probably to some extent reacted on the license of expression as- 
sumed by the English dramatists. Costume was apparently cul- 
tivated with much greater care, and there is no reason to suppose 
that the English stage of this period had not gone, as far as was 
expedient, in a direction in which in feebler times so vast an 
amount of effort had come to be spent. 

§ 113. The Drama a?id Puritanism. 

Up to the outbreak of the Civil War, in 1642, the drama in all 
its forms continued to enjoy the favor or good- will of the Court, 
although a close supervision was exercised over all attempts to 
make the stage the vehicle of political references or allusions. 
The regular official agent of this supervision was the Master of 
the Revels; but under James I a special ordinance, in harmony 
with the King's ideas concerning the dignity of the throne, was 
passed ' ' against representing any modern Christian king in plays 



246 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

on the stage." The theatre could hardly expect to be allowed a 
liberty of speech in reference to matters of State denied to the 
public at large ; and occasional attempts to indulge in the freedom 
of criticism dear to the spirit of Comedy met with more or less 
decisive repression and punishment. 

But the sympathies of the dramatists were so entirely on the side 
of the Court, that the real difficulties against which the theatre had 
to contend came from a directly opposite quarter. With the growth 
of Puritanism the feeling of hostility to the stage increased in a 
large portion of the population, well represented by the civic au- 
thorities of the Capital. This hostility found many ways of 
expressing itself. The attempts to suppress the Blackfriars* 
Theatre — 1619-1631-1633 — proved abortive; but the representa- 
tion of Stage plays continued to be prohibited on Sundays, and 
during the prevalence of the Plague in London, in 1637, was tem- 
porarily suspended. The desire of the Puritans of the more pro- 
nounced type openly aimed at a permanent closing of all the 
theatres. The war between them and the dramatists was accord- 
ingly of a life-and-death kind. On the one hand, the drama 
heaped the bitterest, and often the coarsest, attacks upon whatever 
savored of the Puritan spirit: gibes, taunts, caricatures in ridi- 
cule and aspersion of Puritan and Puritanism, make up a great 
part of the comic literature of the later Elizabethan drama, and of 
its aftergrowth in the reigns of the first and second Stuarts. This 
feeling of hostility , to which Shakespeare was no stranger — see 
Twelfth Night — though he cannot be connected with the author- 
ship of one of its earliest and coarsest expressions — as in The 
Puritan, or the Widow of Watting Street by W. S. — rose into a 
spirit of open defiance in some of the Mask pieces of Ben Jonson 
— in The Alchemist, Bartholo?nezv Fair; and the comedies of his 
immediate successors. Chapman's Humorous Day's Mirth, Mar- 
ston's Dutch Courtesan, and Middleton's Family of Love, abound 
in caricatured reproduction of the more common or more extrav- 
agant types of Puritan life. 

On the other hand, the moral defects, the looseness of tone, the 
mockery of ties sanctioned by law and consecrated by religion, 
the tendency to treat middle-class life as the hunting ground for 
the amusement of the upper classes, which degraded so much of 
the dramatic literature of the age, intensified the Puritan opposi- 
tion to all and any stage plays. A patient endeavor to reform in- 
stead of suppressing the drama was not to be looked for from 






SONGS FROM THE DRAMATISTS 247 

such adversaries, should they ever possess the means of carrying 
out their views ; and so soon as Puritanism should victoriously 
assert itself in the State, the stage was doomed. Among the 
attacks directly against it in the heyday of its prosperity, Prynne's 
His trio Mas fix — 1632 — while it involved its author in shameful 
persecution, did not remain wholly without effect upon the tone 
of the dramatic literature of the subsequent period : but the quar- 
rel between Puritanism and the theatre was too old and too deep 
to end in any but one way, so soon as the latter was deprived of 
its protectors. The Civil War began in 1642 ; and early in the fol- 
lowing month was published an ordinance of the Lords and Com- 
mons, which, after a brief and solemn preamble, commanded "that 
while these sad causes and set times of humiliation do continue, 
public stage-plays shall cease, and be forborne. ' ' Many actors and 
playwrights followed the fortunes of the royal cause in the field ; 
some may have gone into more or less voluntary exile ; upon those 
who lingered in the familiar haunts the hand of power lay heavy ; 
and though there seems reason to believe that dramatical enter- 
tainment of one kind or another continued to be occasionally pre- 
sented, stringent ordinances gave summary powers to magistrates 
against any players found engaged in such proceedings — 1647 — 
and bade them treat all stage -players as rogues, and pull down all 
stage galleries, seats and boxes — 1648. A few dramatic works 
saw daylight, but not many. Something purer and lovelier, more 
thrilling and powerful than real life affords, was needed, which 
with its prophetic vision helps faith to lay hold upon the future 
life. 

§ 114. Song's from the Dramatists. 

Before leaving the dramatists we must make some mention of 
the delightful songs which are scattered over all this period from 
Greene to Shirley. "Of the exquisite songs," says Mr. Edward 
Dowden, " scattered through Shakespeare's plays, it is almost an 
impertinence to speak. If they do not make their own way, like 
the notes in the wildwood, no words will open the ear to take 
them in. There is little song in the historical dramas; how 
should there be much amidst the debates of the council-chamber, 
the clash of swords, the tug of rival interests, the plotting of 
rival courtiers, the ambitious hypocrisies of priests? To hear 
snatches, set to some clear-hearted tune — 'Green Sleeves,' 
perhaps, or 'Light o' Love' — we must haunt the palace of the 
enamored Duke of Illyria, or wander under green boughs in 



248 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Arden, or stray along the yellow sands of the enchanted island, 
or look behind the hedge, while light-footed and light-fingered 
Arutolycus sets the country air a-ringing with his sprightly tirra- 
lirra. In his tragedies Shakespeare has made use of song — his 
own or another's — always with deliberate forethought, always 
with inevitable rightness of genius, to make the pity more rare 
and of a finer edge, to touch the skirts of darkness with a pathetic 
gleam, or to mingle some keen irony with the transient triumph 
of life. 

" In Jonson's plays, in strange contrast with their general char- 
acter, we have a few specimens of that sweetness of sentiment, 
refinement of fancy and indefinite beauty of imagination, which, 
occupying some secluded corner of his large brain, seemed to 
exist apart from his ordinary powers and passions. Among these 
the most exquisite is this Hymn to Diana, which partakes of the 
serenity of the moonlight whose goddess he invokes : 

Queen and huntress, chaste and fair, 

Now the sun is laid to sleep ; 
Seated in thy silver chair, 

State in wonted manner keep. 

Hesperus entreats thy light, 
Goddess, excellently bright. 

Earth, let not thy envious shade 

Dare itself to interpose ; 
Cynthia's shining orb was made 

Heaven to clear when day did close. 

Bless us then with wished sight, 
Goddess, excellently bright, 

L,ay thy bow of pearl apart 

And thy crystal gleaming quiver ; 
Give unto the flying hart 

Space to breathe how short soever. 

Thou that mak'st a day of night, 
Goddess, excellently bright." 

"If, as Jonson's adversaries maliciously asserted, 'every line of 
his poetry cost him a cup of sack,'" says Mr. Whipple, "we 
must, even in our more temperate days, pardon him the eighteen 
cups, which, in this melodious lyric, went into his mouth as sack, 
but, by some precious chemistry, came out through his pen as 
pearls." 

All the qualities of Fletcher's dramatic verse, its delightful ease 
and grace, and its overflowing fancy, come out in the lyrical 



ENGLISH POETICAL SATIRE 249 

speeches of the Faithful Shcphci'dess and others of his plays. In 
that age of songs many a playwright could produce a lyric or two 
of the stamp, which seems to have been well-nigh lost since; but 
songs seem to flow by nature from Fletcher's pen in every style 
and on every occasion, and to be always right and beautiful. If 
he wants a drinking-song he can rise to "God Lyseus, ever 
young," or can produce, which on a much lower level is hardly 
less perfect, the "Drink to-day and drown all sorrow," of the 
Bloody Brother. Sad songs, like those in the Queen of Corinth; 
dirges, like the "Come you, whose loves are dead," in the Knight 
of the Burning Pestle, or the "Lay a garland on my hearse;" in- 
vocations, prayers to Cupid, hymns to Pan — each has its own 
charm, and Fletcher is as ready with his "Beggars," "Broom- 
Man's Song," or even with a dramatic song to give vent to his 
poetic fire. 

§ 1 15. English Poetical Satire. 

Satire became a distinct element of English poetry during the 
latter years of Elizabeth's reign. Many passages, indeed, of 
social and personal invective are found in earlier writers. Chau- 
cer's pictures of the monastic orders abound in open and implied 
censure ; both the spirit and matter of Langland's work are satiri- 
cal ; but in neither of these authors is satire an essential character- 
istic ; a certain infusion of it was inevitable to the task they 
undertook, but it was far ^from being a primary condition . Skelton 
was too ribaldrous, too full of mere venom and spite against in- 
dividuals, to be ranked as anything more than a mere lampooner ; 
and Surrey and Wyatt pointed out the way to this kind of compo- 
sition without following it themselves. The first work in English 
literature, professing to be a satire, and possessing all the essential 
characteristics of that species of literature, was the Virgidemi- 
arum, by Joseph Hall, afterwards Bishop Hall, and the theological 
opponent of Milton. The first three books of the satire were 
published in 1597, and the last three in 1599, the whole being a 
series of poetical attacks on the affectation which then pervaded 
literature and society. As Puritanism and theological controversy 
increased, Satire became more abundant and more bitter. The 
greatest satirists of the reign of James I were John Donne and 
George Wither ; the latter was imprisoned for his satire, Abuses 
Stript and Whipt, written in 16 14. Under Charles I, satirical 
pieces, short but severe, flooded the market and aggravated the 
animosity of Roundhead and Cavalier. 



250 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

§ 116. Psalms and Spiritual Songs. 

The Psalms or Songs of Clement Marot — 1495- 1544 — were ded- 
icated by permission to Francis I, and to the ladies of France. In 
his dedication to the ladies, whom he had so often addressed in 
the tender phrases of passion and of compliment, Marot seems 
anxious to deprecate the raillery, which his new kind of verse was 
likely to incur. ' ' In the spirit of religious gallantry, ' ' he declares, 
that his design is to add to the happiness of his fair readers by 
giving them divine hymns instead of love songs ; to inspire their 
susceptible hearts with a passion in which there is no torment ; 
to banish that fickle and fantastic deity Cupid from the world ; and 
to fill their apartments with praises, not of the "little god" but 
of the true Jehovah. The golden age, he says, would then soon 
be restored. We should see the peasant at his plow, the carman 
in the streets, and the merchant in his shop, solacing their toils 
with psalms and canticles ; and the shepherds and shepherdesses 
reposing in the shade, and teaching the rocks to echo the name of 
their Creator, 

Marot 's Psalms soon eclipsed his madrigals and sonnets. Psalm- 
singing became the general mode of domestic merriment. It was 
the common accompaniment to the fiddle. In the splendid and 
festive Court of Francis I, of a sudden nothing was heard but the 
new Psalms. By each of the royal family, and the principal no- 
bility of the court, a psalm was chosen and fitted to the ballad 
tune which each liked the best. The Dauphin, Prince Henry, 
who delighted in hunting, was fond of Like as the hart desireth 
the water-brooks, which he constantly sung in going out to the 
chase. Madame de Valentinois, between whom and the young 
prince there was an attachment, took From the depth of my heart, 
O Lord. The Queen's favorite was O Lord, rebuke me not in thine 
indignation, which she sung to a fashionable jig. Antony, King 
of Navarre, sung Stand up, O Lord, to revenge my quarrels, to the 
air of a dance of Poitou. But it was on very different principles 
that psalmody flourished in the gloomy Court of Cromwell, al- 
though this fashion does not seem in the least to have diminished 
the gaiety and good humor of the Court of Francis. 

The sagacious mind of Calvin turned to account this new fash- 
ion. Perceiving in it the means of carrying into effect his pre- 
conceived scheme, and of immediately popularizing, as well as 
simplifying the church music, he forthwith introduced the Psalms 



PSALMS AND SPIRITUAL SONGS 251 

of Marot into the congregation at Geneva. Being set to very 
simple airs, in which the whole congregation could join, they 
were soon established as a regular branch of the Genevan worship, 
and formed an appendix to the Genevan Catechism. The Reform- 
ers in England followed the example of their Continental 
brethren; and it is not a little singular, too, that the first version 
of the Psalter, used in public worship to be sung by the whole 
congregation, was made in English as in French, by a layman, a 
courtier, and a court poet. I refer to Thomas Sternhold. Wyatt 
and Surrey had both made metrical versions of particular Psalms. 
Coverdale, the Bible translator, published, as early as 1539, forty 
"Ghostly Psalms and Spiritual Songs." But Sternhold 's Psalms 
were the first used in public worship. Thomas Sternhold, in 1549, 
was groom of the robes to Henry VIII, and afterwards to Edward 
VI. He was a man of serious temperament, and being grieved at 
the lascivious ballads, which prevailed among the courtiers, 
undertook his version of the Psalms, with the laudable design of 
inducing these gay people of fashion to do as they had done in 
France — sing Psalms instead of love-ditties. Sternhold 's Psalms, 
though they did not take with the people of fashion, for whom 
they were primarily intended, were yet exactly in time for the new 
religious movement, and were put in England to the same use as 
were those of Clement Marot in Geneva. 

Sternhold translated only the first fifty-one Psalms. The plan, 
however, projected by him, was carried on by a contemporary 
and coadjutor, John Hopkins, a Calvinistic clergyman, who grad- 
uated at Oxford about 1544. Hopkins translated fifty-eight of the 
Psalms, distinguished in the earliest editions by his initials. The 
others were by William Whittingham, a Calvinistic clergyman, 
who also versified the Decalogue, the Creed, and the Lord's Prayer ; 
by Thomas Norton, the translator of Calvin's Institutes; by Wil- 
liam Kethe, who was an exile with Knox at Geneva, and by 
Wisdome, Archdeacon of Ely. 

Not one of the party concerned in this version seemed to have 
had the slightest particle of taste or feeling of genuine poetry. The 
language is occasionally elevated and pure, because the stanza is 
nothing more than the common prose version, with the words so 
arranged as to make lines and to rhyme. In the main the authors 
fully justify the language of Campbell, who says " that with the 
best intentions and the worst taste, they degraded the spirit of 
Hebrew Psalmody by flat and homely phraseology; and by mis- 



252 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

taking vulgarity for simplicity, turned into bathos what they 
found sublime." 

"How the Ten Commandments and the Athanasian Creed," 
says Warton, " should become more edifying and better suited to 
common use ; or how they would receive improvement in any re- 
spect or degree by being reduced into rhyme, it is not easy to 
perceive." But the real design was to render that more tolerable 
which could not be entirely removed ; to accommodate every part 
of the service to the psalmodic tone; and to clothe the whole 
English liturgy in the garb of Geneva. These, besides the versifi- 
cations of the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds, the Lord's Prayer, 
the Te Deum, the Song of the Three Children, with the other 
hymns that follow the Book of Psalmody, were sung in Whytting- 
ham's Church of Durham, under the author's own directions. 
We must indulge the reader with a stanza or two of the dignified 
fanatic's divine poetry from his Creeds and the Decalogue. Thus 
from the Athanasian Creed : 

The Father God is, God the Son, 

God Holy Ghost also ; 
Yet are there not three Gods in all , 

But one God and no mo. 

Of none the Father is, ne made, 

Ne create, nor begot, 
The Son is of the Father, not 

Create, ne made, but got. 

And thus as follows from the Apostles' Creed: 

From thence shall He come for to judge 

All men, both dead and quick : 
I in the Holy Ghost believe, 

And Church that's catholick. 

The Ten Commandments are thus closed : 

Nor his man-servant nor his maid, 

Nor ox, nor ass of his ; 
Nor any other thing that to 

Thy neighbour proper is. 

Robert Wisdome, a Protestant fugitive in the calamitous reign 
of Queen Mary, afterwards Archdeacon of Ely, rendered the 
twenty-fifth Psalm of this version. But he is chiefly memorable 
for his metrical prayer, intended to be sung in the church, against 
the Pope and the Turk, of whom he seems to have conceived the 
most alarming apprehensions. It is probable that he thought 



PSALMS AND SPIRITUAL SONGS 253 

Popery and Mohammedanism were equally dangerous to Chris- 
tianity, at least the most powerful and the sole enemies of the 
true religion . This is the first stanza : 

Preserve us, Lord, by Thy dear word : 

From Pope and Turk defend us, Lord, 

Which both would thrust out of Thy throne 

Our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy dear Son. 

Allowing for the state of the language in the middle of the six- 
teenth century the religious versifiers of the times appear to have 
been but little qualified either by genius or accomplishments for 
poetical compositions. It is for that reason that they have pro- 
duced a translation of the Psalter entirely destitute of elegance, 
spirit and propriety; but had they been better poets, adds Mr. 
Warton, their performances had been less popular. They under- 
took this work, not so much from an ambition of literary fame or 
a consciousness of abilities, as from motives of piety and in com- 
pliance with the cast of the times. In every part of the transla- 
tion we are disgusted with a languor of versification, and a want 
of common prosody. The most exalted effusions of thanksgiving, 
and the most sublime imageries of the Divine Majesty, are low- 
ered by a coldness of conception, weakened by frequent interpola- 
tions, and disfigured by a poverty of phraseology. John Hopkins 
expostulates with the Deity in these ludicrous, at least trivial, 

expressions : 

Why doost withdrawe thy hand aback 

And hide it in thy lappe ? 
O pluck it out and be not slack 
To give thy foes a rappe. 

What writer who wished to diminish the might of the Supreme 
Being, and to expose the style and sentiments of Scripture, could 
have done it more skilfully than by making David call upon God 
not to consume his enemies by an irresistible blow, but to give 
them a . 

The miraculous march of Jehovah before the Israelites, through 
the wilderness in their departure from Egypt, with other marks 
of His Omnipotence, is thus imaged by the inspired psalmist : 
"O God, when Thou wentest forth before the people, when 
Thou wentest through the wilderness, the earth shook and the 
heavens dropped at the presence of God ; even as Sinai often was 
moved at the presence of God, who is the God of Israel, Thou, 
O God, sentedst a gracious rain upon Thine inheritance, and re- 
freshest it when it was weary. The chariots of God are twenty 






254 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

thousand, even thousand of angels ; and the Lord is among them, 
as in the holy place of Sinai . ' ' Sternhold has thus represented 
these great ideas : 

When thou didst march before thy folk, 

The Egyptians from among, 
And brought them from the wilderness, 

Which was both wide and long, 

The earth did quake, the raine pourde downe, 

Heard were great claps of thunder, 
The mount Sinai shook in such sorte, 

As it would cleave in sunder. 

This heritage with drops of rain 

Abundantly was washt, 
And if so be, it barren was, 

By thee it was refresht. 

God's army is two millions 

Of warriors good and strong, 
The Lord also in Sinai 

Is present them among. — Ps. lxviii : 7, ET SEQ. 

If there be here any merit, it arises solely from preserving the 
expressions of the prose version ; and the translator would have 
done better had he preserved more, and had given us no feeble or 
foreign enlargements, of his own. He has shown no independent 
skill or energy. When once he attempts to add or dilate, his 
weakness appears. It is this circumstance alone which supports 
the two following well-known stanzas : 

The Lord descended from above, 

And bowde the heavens high ; 
And underneath His feet He cast 

The darkness of the skie. 

On Cherubs and on Cherubims 

Full roiallie He rode ; 
And on the winges of all the windes 

Came flying all abrode. — Ps. xviii : 9-10. 

§ 117. Elizabethan Prose. 

" Any treatment of the subject," says Professor James A. Gar- 
nette, of the University of Virginia, " making the smallest pre- 
tensions to fulness, should begin at least as early as the second 
half of the fourteenth century, with the prose of Wickliffe and 
his contemporaries, after the native and foreign elements became 
so blended into one, that what was once foreign was no longer felt 



ELIZABETHAN PROSE 255 

to be so. The progress should be traced through the fifteenth 
century, marked by the names of Mandeville — whose so-called 
1 Travels,' has at length found its true historical position; of 
Pecock, Malory and Caxton, to the first half of the sixteenth 
century, when prose- writers become more numerous, and the lan- 
guage becomes more flexible and better suited to the purpose of 
prose, as seen in the writings of Sir Thomas More and his contro- 
versial opponent, William Tyndale ; of Sir Thomas Elyot, whose 
'Boke, called the Governour' is a real landmark of English 
prose ; of Bishop Hugh Latimer, the most forcible and witty 
preacher of his time ; and of Roger Ascham, who connects the 
reign of Henry VIII and Elizabeth, and who deliberately uses 
English for his works ; although it would have been ' more easier ' 
for him to write in Latin. 

' ' The present paper makes no such pretensions as those indi- 
cated above. Its object is merely to put together certain notes on 
readings in some of the prose -writings of the Elizabethan age, in- 
cluding in this term its inseparable companion the reign of the 
' royal pedant,' and prolonging it into that of his unfortunate son, 
for even Milton is the last of ' the Elizabethans.' 

"In studying the prose of the reign of Elizabeth, it is natural 
to begin with that work whose publication marked an era in the 
history of English prose, almost as notable as that marked in 
poetry by its exact contemporary, Spenser's ' Shepherd's Calendar, ' 
that is, the 'Euphues, or the Anatomy of Wit, ' of John Lyly — 1579- 
80. With the thin thread of thought contained in the plot or story 
of 'the Euphues,' I have nothing to do. The time for writing 
good plots for fiction was ' not yet.' It is altogether with the lan- 
guage, the style, the manner of expression, that I am concerned. 
Moreover, I shall not stop at the misconceptions that have prevailed 
concerning Euphuism, the attempted caricature by Shakespeare, 
or Sir Walter Scott. It is not difficult to seize upon some peculiar 
mannerism of a writer, extravagantly exaggerated, and call that 
his style; but we should neither exaggerate nor 'extenuate, nor 
set down aught in malice.' Dr. Landmann, of Giessen, in his 
introduction to his selections from 'Euphuism and the Arcadia,' 
finds in the Euphues a direct imitation of the style of the Spanish 
writer Guevara, and not only of the style, but of the contents of 
Guevara's ' Life of Marcus Aurelius, ' according to Plutarch, which 
was translated into English by Sir Thomas North, the translator 
of Plutarch's Lives,' also. What, then, are the elements of 



256 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

this style that Guevara claimed as his own, that Lyly popularized 
in English and that held sway for some time as the fashionable 
style in English prose? Landmann regards Lyly's metaphors as 
in most instances not exaggerated or affected, his words as genuine 
English and Elizabeth's, in which he throws off all his allegory 
and speaks immediately from the heart, having been read with 
admiration by successive generations." The finest portion of the 
poem is the picture of the bride, remarkable for its felicitous ten- 
derness, especially when she is thus represented at the altar: 

Behold, while she before the altar stands, 

Hearing the holy priest that to her speakes, 

And blesseth her with his two happy hands, 

How the red roses flush up in her cheekes, 

And the pure snow, with goodly verniill stayne, 

Like crimsin dyde in grayne ; 

That even the Angels, which continually 

About the sacred altar doe remaine, 

Forget their service and about her fly ; 

Ofte peeping in her face, that seems more fayre, 

The more they on it stare. 

But her sad eyes, still fastened on the ground, 

Are governed with goodly modesty, 

That suffers not one look to glaunce away, 

Which may let in a little thought unsownd. 

Why blush ye, Love, to give to me your hand, 

The pledge of all our band ! 

Sing, ye sweet Angels, Alleluya sing, 

That all the woods may answer and your echo ring. 

§ 118. Metaphysical Poets. 
From the death of Elizabeth a decline in poetic genius and vi- 
tality began to grow apparent. Intellect and fancy were substi- 
tuted for the enthusiasm and passion which had infused natural 
life and vigor into the earlier poets. Poetry became pretty and 
affected. Instead of being the spontaneous outburst of natural 
ideas, feeling and emotion, it was artfully strained and contorted, 
to express in eloquent phrases and equivocal metaphors the most 
absurd exaggerations and refinements. This fantastic poetry was 
the transition from the poetry of nature and passion, which had 
burst forth under Italian influence in the reign of Elizabeth, to 
that artificial and correct poetry which developed under French 
influence after the Restoration. Dr. Johnson rather absurdly 
styled these poets Metaphysical, and as such they are known in 
literature. By some they have been better named the poets of con- 



LYRIC POETRY 257 

ceits — see Addison's Spectator, May 1 1 , 1 7 1 1 . The most prominent 
of them were Abraham Cowley — 1618-1667 — whose poem entitled 
"The Mistress" — 1647 — is mentioned by Hallam as the most 
celebrated performance of the Metaphysical Poets ; Edmund Wal- 
ler — 1 605-1 687 — a brilliant, witty and fashionable courtier, whose 
poems treat mostly of love, and who was acknowledged by Dry- 
den and Pope as the ' ' maker and model of melodious verse ; ' ' 
John Donne — 1573-1631 — the most extravagant of all; Sir Wil- 
liam Davenant — 1 605-1 668 — who figured more prominently after 
the Restoration; and Sir John Denham — 1615-1668 — in whose 
poem of "Cooper's Hill" is the once celebrated comparison be- 
tween the Thames and his own poetry, containing four lines which 
have been praised by every critic from Dryden to the present day : 

O, could I flow like thee, and make thy stream 
My great example, as it is my theme ! 
Though deep, yet clear; though gentle, yet not dull ; 
Strong without rage ; without o'erflowing, full. 

Cowley, Waller, Davenant and Denham lived to see the com- 
mencement of a new literary epoch after the brief Puritan Age, 
and their later works show marks of French influence. 

The religious agitations of Puritanism and Episcopacy aroused 
among all classes an interest in sacred poetry. Of the numerous 
religious poets four were especially conspicuous : George Wither, 
Francis Quarles, George Herbert, and Richard Crashaw. 

. § 119. Lyric Poetry. 

In contrast with this serious poetry were the gay lyrics of the 
Cavalier or Caroline poets — fashionable courtiers, brilliant wits, 
who wrote, for popularity and admiration, light musical verses in 
praise of love; beauty and feminine charms. 

Thomas Carew — 1598-1639. — Among these poets Thomas 
Carew takes a foremost place. In genius he is surpassed by Her- 
rick only, and in age he is the first of that gallant band of Cavalier 
song- writers, of whom Rochester is the last. Born in the flush 
of the Elizabethan summer, when the whole garden of English 
poetry was ablaze with blossom, he lived to hand down to his fol- 
lowers a tradition of perfume and dainty form that vivified the 
autumn of the century with a little martin's summer of his own. 
The lyrists of the school of Carew preserved something of the 
Shakespearian tradition when the dramatists of the school of Shir- 
ley had completely lost it ; and the transition from romanticism 
18 



258 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

to classicism was more gently made in this order of writing than 
in any other. It is the special glory of Carew that he formularized 
the practice of writing courtly amorous verses. Strains very 
similar to his own had appeared in the works of older poets, as in 
The Forest of Ben Jonson, and in the plays of Fletcher, but 
always casually : it was Carew who seized this floating improvisa- 
tion, and made an art of it. As there were Anacreontic poets 
before Anacreon, so there were octosyllabic addresses to Julia or 
Celia before Carew ; yet we grant to him the praise of the inven- 
tion since he gave his best work, and not, as others had done, its 
lightest to it. 

In his elegiac lines to Donne, Carew joins the chorus of eulogy 
with more than customary earnestness, and claims for that great 
man the title of king among the English poets. Yet no one of 
Donne's contemporaries was less injuriously affected by the pres- 
ence of that most crabbed and eccentric genius than Carew, whose 
sweet and mellow muse neither rises into dangerous heights nor 
falls into terrible pitfalls, haunted by her audacious sister. A 
certain tendency of conceit was the sin not of one school but of 
the age, and Carew 's trivialities have none of the vehemence or 
intellectual perversity of Donne's. 

— Edmund W. Gosse. 

Robert Herrick — 1591-1674.. — Among the English pastoral poets, 
Herrick takes an undisputed precedence, and as a lyrist generally 
he is scarcely excelled by Shelley. No other writer of the seven- 
teenth century approached him in abundance of song, in sustained 
exercise of the purely musical and intuitive gifts of poetry. 
Shakespeare, Milton, and perhaps Fletcher, surpassed him in the 
passion and elevated harmony of their best lyrical pieces, as they 
easily excelled him in the wider range of their genius and the 
breadth of their accomplishment. But while these men exercised 
their art in all its branches, Herrick confined himself very narrowly 
to one to two; and the unflagging freshness of his inspiration, 
flowing through a long life in so straitened a channel, enabled him 
to amass such a wealth of purely lyrical poetry as no other Eng- 
lishman has produced. His level of performance was very high: 
he seems to have preserved all that he wrote ; and the result is 
that we possess more than twelve hundred of his little poems ; in 
at least one in every three of which we may find something charm- 
ing or characteristic. Of all the Cavalier lyrists, Herrick is the 
only one that followed the bent of his genius undisturbed, and 



IvYRlC POETRY 259 

lived a genuine artist's life. Consequently, while we have to 
lament, in the case of Lovelace or Suckling, a constant waste of 
energy, and unthrifty drain of poetic power, in Herrick all is 
wisety husbanded, and we feel satisfied that we possess the best he 
could produce. His life was an ideal one, so far as quiet and 
retirement went: to fourteen years of seclusion at Cambridge, 
there succeeded twenty years of unbroken Arcadian repose in a 
Devonshire vicarage ; and it was not till the desire to rhyme had 
left him that the poet was brought rudely face to face with the 
clamor and vexation of political feud. Thus he was preserved 
from that public riot and constant disturbance of the Common- 
wealth, which did its best to down the voice of every poet from 
Carew to Dryden ; which drove Crashaw away to madness and 
death ; which made harsh the liquid melodies of Milton ; which 
belied the promise of Davenant, and broke the heart of Cowley. 
From all this disturbance and discord Herrick was fortunately free, 
and we may look in vain through his pastoral elegies and jets of 
amorous verse to discover a trace of the frantic times he lived in. 

— Edmund W. Gossk. 

Sir John Suckling — 1608-1642. — It is impossible to consider the 
poems of Suckling without regard to his career. No English poet 
has lived a life so public, so adventurous and so full of vicissitudes 
as his. Nothing short of an irresistible bias towards the art of 
poetry could have induced so busy and so fortunate a man to write 
in verse at all. Beautiful and vigorous in body, educated in all 
the accomplishments that grace a gentleman, endowed from earliest 
youth with the prestige of a soldier and a popular courtier, his 
enormous wealth enabled him to indulge every whim that a fond- 
ness for what was splendid or eccentric in dress, architecture and 
pageantry, could devise. Such a life could present no void which 
literary ambition could fill, and Suckling's scorn for poetic fame 
was well known to his contemporaries. At the age of nineteen he 
went away to the continent, and wandered through France, Italy, 
Germany and Spain for four years seeking adventures. He offered 
his sword to the King of Sweden, fought in command of a troop 
in front of Glogau and of Magdeburg, performed astounding feats 
of prowess in Silesia, and returned before the battle of Liitzen 
simply because his imperious fancy began to find the great war a 
tedious pastime. He proceeded to London, and lived for six years 
in a style of such gorgeous profusion that at last he contrived to 
cripple one of the amplest fortunes of that age. He retired for a 



260 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

while, ostentatiously enough, into a literary seclusion at Bath, 
taking the obsequious Davenant with him as a sort of amanuensis. 
During that brief time, no doubt, his tragedies were composed. 
The king, however, fretted for his return, and he emerged as the 
leader of the royalist party in its earliest troubles. After the crisis „ 
Suckling fled to France, and thence to Spain : at Madrid he fell 
into the clutches of the Inquisition, and underwent horrible tortures. 
He escaped to Paris, with a mind probably unstrung by these 
torments, for he poisoned himself in his thirty-fourth year. Such 
was the career of a man whose light verses, carelessly thrown off 
and half forgotten, have outlived the pomp and public glitter of 
his famous adventures, by which he now seems to us rather injured 
than exalted. 

Written under such circumstances, and preserved in a fragment- 
ary state by friends, it would be surprising if the poems of Suck- 
ling presented any great finish or completeness. In point of fact y 
they display to us but the ruins of his genius. A ballad of won- 
derful brightness and sweetness, a half-dozen songs full of the most 
aery and courtly grace, these alone of all he has left behind him> 
are in an}^ sense worthy of their author's splendid fame. His 
contemporaries and the men of the next generation, remembering^ 
his shining qualities of personal presence, his wit, his fluent fancy, 
and, perhaps, many fine poems that we shall never see, spoke of 
him as an epoch-making writer, in terms that we reserve for Her- 
rick, of whom they never speak. His name still lives in the pop- 
ular ear, as the names of poets, far greater than he, will never live. 
His figure takes a place in poetic literature, which the student 
fresh from his pages is apt to consider unduly high, and which 
his "golden fragments" scarcely seem to justify. 

But the instinct of the people, in this as in many other cases, is 
probably right, and, though the imperfections of his poems may 
cloud it, there is no doubt that his genius existed. It shows it- 
self even more in his disciples than in himself: his manner of 
writing affected the course of English literature, and showed its 
strength less in his own lyrics than in the fact, that for the next 
fifty years no one could write a good love-song without more or 
less reminding the reader of Suckling. To the very end of the 
century ' ' natural, easy Suckling' ' was the type of literary elegance 
to the Millimants and I^ady Froths of Fashion. 

Richard Lovelace — 1618-1658. — It may safely be said that of all 
the royalist lyrists Lovelace has been overestimated the most, as 






LYRIC POETRY 261 

Carew has been the most neglected. The reason of this is not hard 
to find. Carew was a poet of great art and study, whose pieces 
reach a high but comparatively uniform standard, while Lovelace 
Was an improvisatore, who wrote two of the best songs in the lan- 
guage by accident, and whose other work is of much inferior 
quality. 

A more slovenly poet than Lovelace it would be difficult to 
find : his verses have reached us in the condition of unrevised 
proofs sent out by a careless compositor ; but it is plain that not 
to the printer only is due the lax and irregular form of the poems. 
It did not always occur to Lovelace to find a rhyme, or to persist 
in a measure, and his ear seems to have been singularly defective. 
To these technical faults he added a radical tastelessness of fancy, 
and an excess of the tendency of all his contemporaries to dwell 
on the surroundings of a subject rather than on the subject itself. 
His verses on "Ellinda's Glove" must have been remarkable 
-even in an age of concetti. The poet commences by calling the 
.glove a snowy farm with five tenements ; he has visited there to 
pay his daily rents to the white mistress of the farm, who has 
gone into the meadows to gather flowers and hearts. He then 
changes his image and calls the glove an ermine cabinet „ whose 
alabaster lady will soon come home, since any other tenant would 
eject himself by finding the rooms too narrow to contain him. 
The poet, therefore, leaves his rent — five kisses — at the door, ob- 
serving, with another change of figure, that though the lute is too 
high for him, yet, like a servant, he is allowed to fiddle with the 
<case. Such trivialities as these were brought into fashion by the 
wayward genius of Donne, and continued in vogue long enough 
to betray the youth of Dryden . In Lovelace we find the fashion 
in its most insipid extravagance. 

Yet there are high qualities in the verses of Lovelace, though 
he rarely allows us to see them unalloyed. His language has an 
-heroic ring about it ; he employs fine epithets and gallant phrases, 
two of which have secured the popular ear, and become part of 
our common speech. " Going to the Wars," his best poem, con- 
tains no line or part of a line that could by any possibility be im- 
proved. ' ' To Althea " is less perfect, but belongs to a higher 
order of poetry. The first and fourth stanzas of this exquisite lyric 
would do honor to the most illustrious name and form one of the 
treasures of our literature. It is surprising that a poet so obscure 
could be so crystalline, and that the weaver of gossamer conceits 



262 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

could continue to be so tenderly sincere. The romantic circum- 
stances under which .Lovelace wrote these lines have given them 
a popular charm. The imprisonment under which he was suf- 
ering was brought upon him in the unselfish performance of duty. 
He had been chosen by the whole body of the county of Kent to 
deliver the Kentish petition to the House of Commons ; the result 
was, doubtless, what he expected, the petition being burned by 
the common hangman, and he himself, on the 30th of April, 1642, 
thrown into the Gatehouse Prison. 

TO AI/THEA FROM PRISON. 

When love, with unconfined wings, 

Hovers within my gates, 
And my divine Althea brings 

To whisper at the grates ; 
When I lie tangled in her hair, 

And fettered to her eye, 
The birds that wanton in the air 

Know no such liberty. 

When flowing cups run swiftly round 

With no allaying Thames, 
Our careless heads with roses bound, 

Our hearts with loyal flames ; 
When thirsty grief in wine we steep, 

When healths and draughts go free, 
Fishes that tipple in the deep 

Know no such liberty. 

When, like committed linnets, I 

With shriller throat shall sing 
The sweetness, mercy, majesty, 

And glories of my King ; 
When I shall voice aloud, how good 

He is, how great should be, 
Enlarged winds that curl the flood 

Know no such liberty. 

Stone walls do not a prison make, 

Nor iron bars a cage ; 
Minds innocent and quiet take 

That for a hermitage ; 
If I have freedom in my love, 

And in my soul am free, 
Angels alone, that soar above, 

Enjoy such liberty. 



PROSK STYIvK OF RICHARD HOOKER 263 

§ 120. Prose Style of Richard Hooker — 155J-1600. 

But it is now time to consider that writer who made the greatest 
advance of all writers of the reign of Elizabeth, towards the 
formation of a really good English prose style, ''the judicious 
Hooker." He has often been praised for first treating an abstruse 
philosophical subject in English and not in Latin, and he deserves 
all the credit that can be awarded him ; for he preceded Bacon and 
differed from him, too, in that Bacon thought it necessary to trans- 
late even his English works into Latin, that his fame might be 
perpetuated to posterity. Had Hooker written in Latin, his great 
work would have been relegated to the limbo of forgotten books, 
and English literature would have been deprived of its first modern 
prose writer that is still cherished and admired. 

Dean Church, in the introduction to his edition of the first book 
of Hooker's " Ecclesiastical Polity," the book which is of general 
interest, and which was published with three others in 1594, says 
of Hooker's writings, that "they mark an epoch at once in the 
history of English thought and in the progress of the English 
language; that Hooker, like Shakespeare and Bacon, may be said 
to have opened a new vein in the use of the English language ; 
and further, that Hooker is really the beginning of what deserves 
to be called English literature in its theological and philosophical 
province." 

These statements are not exaggerated. Let any one read the 
literature of the time, even the best of its prose, that of Lyly or 
Sidney, and then take up the "Ecclesiastical Polity." Although 
these writers mark an advance in English prose, Hooker at one 
leap went far beyond them. It is a marvel where he got his style 
from. He had no model ; he evolved from his own consciousness 
the phraseology and expression that so well suited his w 7 eighty 
thoughts. That he should have been to some extent under the 
influence of the Latin and Greek writers, who formed the subjects 
of his daily studies, was in no wa}^ remarkable. But what is 
remarkable, is that he should have succeeded in transferring the 
gist of his studies into such pure and idiomatic English. 

Hooker's style has, we think, been depreciated by Professor 
Minto. Dean Church's view seem to be more critical. He says 
of Hooker's works : ' ' He first revealed to the world what English 
prose might be ; its power of grappling with difficult conceptions 
and subtle reasonings ; of bringing information and passion to 
animate and illuminate severe thought ; of suiting itself to the 



264 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

immense variety of lights and moods and feelings, which really 
surround and accompany the work of the mind; its power of 
attracting and charming like poetry ; its capacity for a most deli- 
cate or most lofty music . The men who first read the early books 
of Hooker must have felt that their mother tongue had suddenly 
•appeared in a form, which might bear comparison with the great 
classical models for force and beauty." Dean Church refers to the 
statement of Swift, that Hooker "had written English so naturally 
and simply that his works survived the changes of fashion, and 
could be read without offense in the days of Addison and Pope." 

The qualities of Hooker's style that will first strike the reader 
are, we think, their smoothness of expression and compactness of 
structure. He sometimes has long sentences, but they are well 
constructed ; long, but his and those of Sidney are as far apart as 
the antipodes. Had he written like Sidney, it would have been a 
labor to disinter his thought. On the contrary, he is always clear 
in style, even when the thought itself is abstract. With him the 
thought is the main element, not, as with Eyly, the manner of 
expression ; and his style fits the thought. The expression is 
always forcible and sometimes elegant. His vocabulary is pure 
and copious: there are very few obsolete w r ords, and there are 
comparatively few Latinisms. That the style has an archaic cast, 
or that there is an occasional quaintness of expression, is to be ex- 
pected. To look for anything else is to expect an Elizabethan to 
write like a Victorian, and to overlook three hundred years of 
progress in English prose. 

Is then Hooker's style perfect? Has it no faults ? Viewed from 
a modern standpoint it has some peculiarities to which exception 
might be taken. That one which will first atttact attention is 
Hooker's fondness for inversion, derived from his familiarity with 
Latin writings. While inversion is often forcible and, therefore, 
permissible on occasions, as it gives the emphatic position to the 
emphatic words, it may be easily carried too far. Also, there are 
occasional ellipses, especially of the substantive verb and of the 
relative pronoun, which the reader is left to supply, but that is 
easily done. Hooker frequently uses the personal pronoun as 
antecedent to the relative, where we should use the demonstrative : 
as them who, them whom, or them which, referring to persons, and 
he even includes the antecedent in the possessive, as ' l their brutish - 
ness which imagine ; ' ' but these expressions ar efamiliar to every 
reader of Shakespeare. Again, we sometimes find two subjects 



PROSE STYLE OF RICHARD HOOKER 265 

with £ singular verb, as "force and injury was offered;" except 
is used as a conjunction, as "except they gave their common con- 
sent;" of in the sense of from, as in the expression, "who of 
fathers were made rulers ; ' ' and even such a rhetorical bugbear as 
' ' those kind of positive law. ' ' 

But it is not worth while to enumerate words and expressions 
belonging to the Elizabethan age, of which a long list might be 
made even from the First Book ; they simply serve to give to the 
style a quaintness and an archaic flavor that are very attractive. 
We here give a long sentence as an example of Hooker's higher 
style, his eulogy of faith, hope and charity, as revealed in the law 
of God : 

" Concerning faith, the principal object, whereof is that eternal 
verity which hath discovered the treasures of hidden wisdom in 
Christ; concerning hope, the highest object whereof is that ever- 
lasting goodness which in Christ doth quicken the dead ; concern- 
ing charity, the final object whereof is that incomprehensible 
beauty which shineth in the countenance of Christ, the Son of the 
living God ; concerning these virtues, the first of which, beginning 
here with a weak apprehension of things not seen, endeth with the 
intuitive vision of God in the world to come ; the second, beginning 
here with a trembling expectation of things far removed and as yet 
but only heard of, endeth with real and actual fruition of that 
which no tongue can express ; the third, beginning here with the 
inclination of the heart towards Him unto whom we are able to 
approach, endeth with endless union, the mystery whereof is 
higher than the reach of the thoughts of men ; concerning that 
faith, hope, and charity without which there can be no salvation, 
was there ever any mention made saving only in that law which 
God Himself gave from Heaven revealed? There is not in the 
world a syllable muttered with certain truth concerning any of 
these three more than what hath been supernaturally received from 
the mouth of the Eternal God." 

What modern writer might not envy the grand tone of this 
simple climax, the elegant expression of thoughts, as fresh now 
as when first uttered, in language as easily intelligible as if three 
hundred years did not separate them from us to-day ! It is hard, 
indeed, to realize the fact that his book was probably written in the 
year of Sidney's death, and but five or six years after the Euphues 
and the Arcadia. It would seem as if a century should have 
intervened to secure such progress in English prose. 



266 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

§ 121. Prose Style of Sir Walter Raleigh — 1552-1618 . 

Raleigh had preceded Bacon in the art of description and narra- 
tive. His brief report of ' ' The Last Night of Revenge ' ' had been 
written in 1591 ; and his "History of the World" was composed 
during his imprisonment. But Raleigh's style was not equal to 
Bacon's, notwithstanding some very beautiful descriptive passages. 
He frequently uses long sentences, strung together without dis- 
crimination, and is especially faulty in the treatment of that bane 
of Elizabethan writers, the relative pronoun. His style leaves the 
impression of crowding together into one sentence too many 
topics. His greatest prose work is unquestionably his "History 
of the World," which, however, is brought down only to the end 
of the Macedonian empire. It is clear and spirited, acute with- 
out being taken up with trivialities, and is pervaded with the 
sweet spirit of philosophic culture. 

"The Greek and Roman story," says Hallam, "is told more 
fully and exactly — in the History of the World — than by any 
earlier English authors, and with a plain eloquence that has given 
the book a classical reputation in our language, although from its 
length, and the want of that critical sifting which we now justly 
demand, it is not greatly read. There is little now that is obso- 
lete in the words of Raleigh, not, in any degree, in his turns of 
phrases ; the periods when pains have been taken with them, 
show that artificial structure which we find in Sidney and Hooker ; 
and he is less pedantic than most of his contemporaries, seldom 
low, never affected." 

§ 122. Prose Style of Sir Philip Sidney — 1554.-1586. 

We now pass to Lyly's more distinguished contemporary, Sir 
Philip Sidney, who has left us the " Arcadia " and the little pam- 
phlet "An Apologie for Poetrie," as examples of his prose style. 
Eandmann has printed the first chapter of the first book of the 
Arcadia along with his selections from Euphues, and has summed 
up the chief elements of Sidney's style. He thinks that ' ' although 
Sidney may have been a Euphuist at court, he avoided it entirely 
in his Arcadia, written between 1580-1586; and that the publi- 
cation of the Arcadia, in 1590, detracted much from the reputa- 
tion of the Euphues. He finds the chief elements of style in the 
Arcadia to consist of "endless, tedious sentences, one sometimes 
filling a page, in the fondness for details, and in the description 



PROSE STYLE OF SIR PHILIP SIDNEY 267 

of the beauties of rural scenery ; also in comparisons and conceits 
couched in excessively metaphorical language, quaint circumlo- 
cutions for simple expressions and bold personifications of inani- 
mate objects." "Besides," says he, "Sidney is fond of playing 
upon words, and is not averse to simple alliteration, but he avoids 
Lyly's artificial combination of parisonic antithesis with transverse 
alliteration, as well as his absurd similes taken from Plutarch;" 
and so he concludes that Sidney's style and diction are certainly 
affected, but that his language has, nevertheless, its charms, and 
has decidedly won the ascendency over Lyly's more artificial 
extravagance. 

The Apologie for Poetrie is usually considered a better speci- 
men of Sidney's prose style than the Arcadia. It is, perhaps, 
freer from the faults of the latter work, which have been well 
characterized by Mr. Saintsbury, who says: "If Sidney's vocab- 
ulary is not Latinized or Italianized or Lylyfied, he was one of 
the greatest sinners in the special Elizabethan sin of convoluting 
and entangling his phrases, so as to say the simplest thing in the 
least simple manner. Yet again, he is one of the arch-offenders 
in the matter of spoiling the syntax of the sentence and the para- 
graph. Sidney was one of the first writers of great popularity and 
influence, to introduce what may be called the sentence — and para- 
graph heap — in which clause is linked on to clause, and all not 
merely the grammatical, but the philosophical integer is hopelessly 
lost sight of in a tangle of jointings and appendices. ' ' ' ' The faults 
of Kuphues," he thinks, "were faults which were certain to work 
their own cure ; those of the Arcadia were so engaging in them- 
selves, and linked with so many merits and beauties, that they 
were sure to set a dangerous example. ' ' We must concur with Mr. 
Saintsbury in these criticisms, nor do we think that many "purple 
patches " make amends for a deficiency in syntactical clearness. 

But let us test the matter by a few specimens of Sidney's style ; 
that is, if it is ever right to judge an author by short examples, 
which, however, well they may serve for illustration of particular 
points, can never give a correct idea of the writer's general style. 
Let us take the opening sentence of the Arcadia, as given in 
Landmann's selections: 

' ' It was in the time that the earth begins to put on her new 
aparrel against the approach of her lover, and that the sun run- 
ning a most even course becums an indifferent arbiter between the 
night and the day ; when the hopelesse shepheard Strephon was 



268 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

come to the sandes, which lie against the Island ol Cithera ; where 
viewing the place with a heavy kinde of delight, and sometimes 
casting his eyes Ileward, he called his friendly rivall, the pastor 
Claius unto him, and setting first downe in his darkened counte- 
nance a doleful copie of what he would speake : O my Claius, said 
he, hether we are now come to pay the rent, for which we are so 
called unto by over-busie Remembrance, restlesse Remembrance, 
which claymes not onlye this dutie of us, but it will have us forget 
ourselves . ' ' 

It almost takes one's breath away to read a fourteen -line opening 
sentence, with relative clause strung on to relative clause. Here 
we find metaphorical conceits, and even the alternate alliteration 
for which Lyly is so condemned ; and — to quote but part of the 
next sentence, " Did Remembrance graunt us any holiday, eyther 
for pastime or devotion, nay, eyther for necessary foode or natural 
rest? but that still it forced our thoughts to worke upon this place, 
where we last — alas, that the word last should so long last — did 
gaze our eyes upon her ever-flourishing beautie, " and so on, 
where shall we find in Lyly a worse-sounding play upon words 
and alliteration combined ? This play upon words was, however, a 
common characteristic of Elizabethan language, and Shakespeare 
himself is a very grievous offender in this respect. What can be 
worse than Mercutio's chaffing of Romeo and Romeo's retorts? 

But Sidney's style is faulty not only in its long sentences. The 
chief fault we should find with it is its lack of correct syntax; 
subjects seem to be forgotten before the corresponding predicates 
are introduced; predicates are frequently found with no subjects 
expressed, and they must be inferred from the context ; and some- 
times the subject is so far removed from the predicate by interven- 
ing clauses that it is difficult to make the connection ; for example : 
"But the fishermen, when they came so near him, that it was 
time to throwe out a rope, by which hold they might draw him, 
their simplicity bred such amasement, and their amasement such 
a superstition, that — assuredly thinking it was some god begotten 
between Neptune and Venus, that had made all this terrible 
slaughter — as they went under sayle by him, held up their hands, 
and made their prayers. We finally discover that it was the fisher- 
men who held up their hands and made their prayers," but only 
after the intervention of no less than six dependent sentences and 
a parenthetical clause ; and, moreover, the principal subject has no 
predicate, and the principal predicate no subject expressed. This 



PROSE STYLE OF SIR PHILIP SIDNEY 269 

remarkable sentence continues for ten lines further on beginning 
with the Latinism, ' ' Which when Mzisidorus sawe, though he were 
almost as much ravished with joy as they with astonishment, he 
lept to the Mariner, and tooke the rope out of his hand and" — 
but enough has been quoted for our purpose. It reminds one of 
the familiar expression of C&sar's, Quae cum ita sint, that school- 
boys are so fond of translating with exact literalness, order and 
all. However good for Latin it will not answer for English. 

Let us glance for a moment at the Apologie for Poetrie. Sidney 
sums up the first part of his argument with a sentence nearly a 
page long, no less than eight successive dependent sentences be- 
ginning with the conjunction sith — that is, since — but we will let 
that pass, as it is the conclusion of one section and the opening of 
another. We have already stated that the style of the Apologie 
is considered better than that of the Arcadia. Its syntax is 
less involved ; it is clearer and simpler ; it is freer from conceits ; 
and, while naturally containing archaic words and phrases of the 
time, it is, looked at from a modern standpoint, as more correct. 
We meet, however, with alliteration, as "a great many wandering 
wordes; by styrring the spleene may stay the braine; confute 
others' knowledge before theyconfirme theyr owne" — all within a 
few lines ; and we find some phrases that would offend the ears 
of our modern rhetoricians ; "of all other learnings ; those kinde 
of objections; without we will say ; " and twice in close connec- 
tion the good old idiom "I had much rather," which some of our 
neo -grammarians are trying to rule out of the language, but is 
found in all periods of good English. But Sidney cannot always 
straighten out his syntax, even in a short sentence, as: "Of the 
otherside, who wold shew the honors, have been by the best sort 
of judgements granted them, a whole sea of examples woulde 
present themselves." This sentence is an example of the extreme 
elliptical style, for we find that not only is there an ellipsis of the 
antecedent those of the relative who, but also an ellipsis of the rel- 
ative which, referring to honors, and the reader is expected to sup- 
ply them for himself. We may be permitted to apply to Sidney's 
syntax his own expression concerning Gorboduc, of which Sidney 
had a high opinion, yet because it violated the unities, he thought 
that it was, in truth, "very defectious in the circumstances." 



270 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

§ 123. Prose Style of Francis Bacon — 1561—1626. 

But we must now hurry on to notice briefly Hooker's great 
contemporary, who has also left his mark on English prose. In 
1597 , three years after the publication of the ' 'Ecclesiastical Polity, ' ' 
appeared the first ten "Essays" of Francis Bacon, enlarged to 
forty in the edition of 16 12, and to fifty-eight in that of 1625, the 
year before Bacon's death. From Professor Arber's parallel-text 
edition it can be easily seen that each essay grew under Bacon's 
revision and enlargement. It is usual to take these essays as 
specimens of Bacon's English style, comment upon them and 
advise students to read them now. While they are very valuable for 
the condensed thought that they contain, it does not seem to us 
that they can be praised for their style. The nature of the work 
forbids it. The style is highly aphoristic, and consists in putting 
into as small a compass as possible as much thought as possible, 
and there is no room for graces of style. By comparing, how- 
ever, an early essay with its later form, it maybe seen how Bacon's 
style improved. The expression is fuller and freer, and less aphor- 
istic. Compare, for instance, the brief additions made in the later 
issues to the essay in " Studies," which appears in four texts, or 
better, the final form of the essay on "Religion," first issued in 
161 2, the title of which was altered to, "By Unity in Religion," 
after its revision in 1625. 

A better idea of Bacon's English style may be obtained from his 
History of Henry VII, written most probably in 1621-1622, soon 
after he went into retirement, and pronounced by the best judge 
of the age, Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, the friend of Sidney, as 
"incomparable." In this history Bacon treated a subject which 
had long occupied his mind ; he was interested in it, and he wrote 
when his intellectual powers were most vigorous, as he was not 
more than sixty years of age. He had here a fine field for the 
display of the excellencies of his style. The progress of historical 
composition may be seen by comparing Bacon's work with the 
older chronicles, from two of which extracts are given by a clever 
critic, who says : 

' ' The perusal of a few lines will suffice to show what a great 
stride in English prose composition was made during the reign of 
Elizabeth, and to what a degree of perfection it had been brought 
by the powers of such writers as Bacon and Hooker. The supe- 
rior ease and finish, the naturalness of Bacon's style strike us at 
once in the comparison." 



PROSK STYLE OF FRANCIS BACON 271 

Bacon's narrative style may be illustrated by a few quotations. 
His logical mind knew how to arrange his thoughts systematically 
and to discriminate proportionally, and the style conforms to the 
thought. This may be seen at almost the very opening of his 
work. Discussing the King's title to the throne, he says : " But 
King Henry, in the very entrance of his reign, and the instant of 
time when the kingdom was cast into his arms, met with a point 
of great difficulty and knotty to solve, able to trouble and con- 
found the wisest king in the newness of his estate ; and so much 
the more because it could not endure a deliberation, but must be 
at once deliberated and determined. There were fallen to his lot, 
and concurrent in his person, three several titles to the imperial 
crown. The first, was the title of the Lady Elizabeth, granddaugh- 
ter of Edward IV, whom, by precedent pact with the past, 
that brought him in, he was to marry ; the second, the ancient and 
long disputed title, both by plea and arms, of the House of Lan- 
caster, to which he was inheritor in his own person ; the third, 
the title of the sword or conquest, for he came in by the victory 
of battle, and that the King in possession was slain on the field." 
Here all is clear, simple and compact, the punctuation alone dif- 
fering somewhat from modern usage, but the language easy and 
expressive. After considering each of these titles to the crown, 
Bacon sums the King's decision as follows, the sentence itself 
furnishing a good illustration of the way in which Bacon managed 
the long sentence, intercalating subordinate clauses between sub- 
ject and predicate, and adding participial and relative clauses after 
the main predicate, thus uniting the periodic and loose structure : 

"But the King, out of the greatness of his own mind, presently 
cast the die ; and the inconveniences appearing unto him on all 
parts, and knowing there could not be any inter-reign or suspension 
of title, and preferring his affection to his own line and blood, and 
liking that title best which made him independent ; and being in 
his nature and constitution of mind not very apprehensive of 
forecasting of future events afar off, but an entertainer of fortune 
by the day ; resolved to rest upon the title of Lancaster, as the 
main, and to use the other two, that of marriage, and that of 
battle, but as supporters, the one to appease secret discontents, and 
the other to beat down open murder and dispute ; not forgetting 
that the same title of Lancaster had formerly maintained a pos- 
session of three descents in the crown ; and might have proved 
a perpetuity had it not ended in the weakness and inability of 



272 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

the last prince. Whereupon, the King presently, that very day, 
being the two and. twentieth of August, assumed the title of king 
in his own name, without mention of the Lady Elizabeth at all, or 
any relation thereunto. In which course he ever thereafter per- 
sisted, which did spin him a thread of many seditions and troubles. ' ' 
Whatever changes might be needed to give the sentence a more 
modern form, it cannot be denied that it is perfectly clear as it stands. 
It merely illustrates the Elizabethan tendency to put as many con- 
nected thoughts as possible into one sentence, without regard to 
elegance of style. The sentence is cumbersome without doubt, 
but easily intelligible. 

The last section of Bacon's work, his description of the char- 
acter of the King, is an excellent illustration of his style. The 
sentences are short and well constructed. The terms are chosen 
with skill to express each trait of character, habit and disposition 
of the man. The plainest and most idiomatic English is used. 
One paragraph alone must suffice for illustration : ' ' He was a prince, 
sad, serious, and full of thoughts and secret observations, and full 
of notes and memorials of his own hand, especially touching 
persons, as it regards whom to employ, whom to reward, whom to 
inquire of, whom to beware of, what were the dependencies, what 
were the factions and the like — a journal, as it were of his own 
thoughts. There is to this day a merry tale: that his monkey, 
set on, as was thought, by one of his chamber, tore his principal 
note-book all to pieces, when by chance it lay forth; whereat the 
country, which liked not those pensive accounts, was almost tickled 
with sport." Whatever criticisms may be made of Bacon's style, 
it was a great advance upon any of his predecessors except Hooker. 

"Unhappy Bacon," as Thomas Babington Macaulay writes, 
"was unused to pay minute attention to domestic affairs. He was 
not easily persuaded to give up any part of the magnificence to 
which he had been accustomed in the time of his power and pros- 
perity. No pressure of distress could induce him to part with the 
woods of Gorhambury. ' I will not' he said, 'be stript of my 
feathers.' He travelled with so splendid an equipage and so large 
a retinue, that. Prince Charles, who once fell in with him on the 
road, exclaimed, with surprise: 'Well, do what we can, this man 
scorns to go out in snuff. ' This carelessness and ostentation re- 
duced him to frequent distress. He was under the necessity of 
parting with York House and of taking up his residence during 
his visits to London, at his old chamber in Gray's Inn. Im- 



JOHN DONNE 273 

peached, convicted, sentenced, driven with ignominy from the 
presence of his sovereign, shut out from the deliberations of his 
fellow-nobles, loaded with debt, branded with dishonor, sinking 
under the weight of years, sorrow, and disease, Bacon was Bacon 
still." 

Bacon died a victim to scientific experiment. While riding 
during a snow-storm the thought of making use of snow, as an 
antiseptic agent instead of salt, occurred to him, and in alighting 
from his carriage to attempt the experiment he took a severe cold, 
which threw him into a fever, of which he died in April, 1626. 
According* to the wish expressed in his will, Bacon was buried in 
St. Michael's Church, near St. Albans, and Sir Thomas Meautys, 
his faithful secretary, erected at his own cost a handsome monu- 
ment, representing him in a sitting posture, his head resting on his 
hands, and absorbed in contemplation. In his will were these 
Words : ' ' My name and memory I leave to foreign nations, and to 
my own countrymen after some time has passed over." 

§ 124. John Donne — 1573-1631. 

It is singularly difficult to pronounce a judicious opinion on the 
Writings of Donne. They were excessively admired by his own 
and the next generation, praised by Dryden, paraphrased by Pope, 
and then entirely neglected for a whole century. The first im- 
pression of an unbiased reader who dips into the poems of Donne 
is unfavorable. He is repulsed by the intolerably harsh and 
crabbed versification, by the recondite choice of theme, expres- 
sion, and by the oddity of his thought. In time, however, he 
perceives that behind the fantastic garb of language, there is an 
earnest and vigorous mind, an imagination that harbors fire within 
the cloddy folds, and an insight into the mysteries of spiritual life 
that is often startling. 

Donne excels in brief flashes of wit and beauty, and in daring 
phrases that have the full perfume of poetry in them. Some of 
his lyrics, and, one or two of his lyrics, the satires, are his most 
important contributions to literature. They are probably the first 
poetry of the kind in the language, and they are full of force and 
picturesqueness. Their obscure and knotty language only serves 
to give peculiar brilliancy to the not uncommon passages of noble 
perspicuity. To the terminology of Donne's poetic philosophy 
Dryden gave the name metaphysics, and Dr. Johnson, borrowing 
the suggestion, invented the title of the "metaphysical " school to 
IQ 



274 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

describe, not Donne only, but all the amorous and philosophical 
poets who succeeded him, and employed a similar fantastic lan- 
guage, and who affected odd figurative inversions. 

§ 125. Prose Style of Benjamin J onson — 1574-1637. 

We must not fail in this connection to make mention of a writer, 
who, on account of his distinction in another field of literature, 
has not occupied the position he deserves as a writer of English 
prose, "rare Ben Jonson." There is no better writer of Eliza- 
bethan prose than Jonson, and he marks a distinct advance upon 
Bacon. Mr. Saintsbury has well, though briefly, criticized his. 
style, and Mr. Swinburne has drawn attention to the value of his 
works in a recent article in the Fortnightly Review — July, 1888. 
There needs but a hasty perusal of his "Timber; or, Discoveries. 
Made Upon Men and Matter," to justify the prominence given to 
him as a writer of prose by these learned critics. The modernness 
of his style at once impresses the reader. Saintsbury rightly says : 
' ' There can be no greater contrast than exists between the prose 
style usual at that time and the straightforward, vigorous English 
of the Discoveries . They come, in character as in time, midway 
between Hooker and Dry den, and they incline rather to the more 
than to the less modern form." Mr. Swinburne remarks, with his. 
accustomed hyperbole : "A single leaf of the Discoveries is worth 
all his lyrics, tragedies, elegies and epigrams together. ' ' Of course 
he omits his comedies. 

Ben Jonson was not only a writer; he was also a critic of 
English prose style. We shall look in vain for a better reasoned 
and better expressed treatise on style than that section of the 
Discoveries, headed with Jonson 's fondness for Latin titles, De 
stylo et Optimo scribendi genere. He refers occasionally to Quintilian, 
and doubtless was indebted to him for some of his thoughts, but 
his mode of expression was all his own. 

Jonson thus begins : ' ' For a man to write well there are re- 
quired three necessaries: to read the best authors, observe the 
best speakers, and much exercise of his own style. In style to 
consider what ought to be written, and after what manner: he 
must first think and excogitate his matter ; then choose his words 
and examine the weight of either. Then take care in placing and 
ranking both matter and words, that the composition be comely, 
and to do this with diligence and often. No matter how slow at 
first, so it be laboured and accurate, seek the best and be not glad 






PROSE STYLE OF BENJAMIN JONSON 275 

of froward conceits, or first words that offer themselves to us, but 
judge of what we invent and order what we approve." But one 
here hardly knows where to stop a quotation from this excellent 
extract. Considering its subject, this brief essay is equal to any- 
thing in Bacon, and as to its style it is far easier and simpler, 
much less quaint and archaic — and Jonson died but eleven years 
after Bacon . L,et us again listen to some of his pungent advice : 

' ' But arts and precepts avail nothing except nature is beneficial 
and aiding. And, therefore, these things are no more written to 
a dull disposition than rules of husbandry to a soil. No precepts 
will profit a fool, no more than beauty will the blind, or music 
the deaf. As we should take care that our style in writing be 
neither dry nor empty ; we should look again that it be not wind- 
ing, or wanton with far-fetched descriptions ; either is a vice. But 
that is worse which proceeds out of want than that which riots out 
of plenty. The remedy of fruitfulness is easy, but no labour will 
help the contrary ; I will like and praise some things in a young 
writer, which yet, if he continue in, I cannot but justly hate for 
the same." Notwithstanding the general ease of expression in 
this sentence, the peculiar Elizabethan use of the relative pronoun 
jars upon the ear attuned to grammatical precision. 

The chief fault we would find with Jonson 's style is one char- 
acteristic of all writers of the time, a tendency to ellipsis, espe- 
cially the ellipsis of the subject and of the substantive verb, which 
exist in Shakespeare passim . But for clearness and smoothness 
of style, simplicity and purity of expression, correct structure 
and forcible balance, avoidance of cumbrous periods, which 
always lead in the Elizabethan writers to ungrammatical structure 
— though Jonson recognizes that ' ' periods are beautiful where they 
are not too long ' ' — and for all these desirable qualities of a good 
prose, we shall find no Elizabethan writer surpassing Ben Jonson. 
His liberal culture, his sound judgment, his "much exercise of 
his own style" in his dramatic writings, all contributed to place 
his prose among the best of the period, and to furnish a standing 
example of the benefits conferred upon the language by its culti- 
vation in the Elizabethan drama. 

In the history of English prose style it is a " far cry ' ' from Lyly 
to Jonson, although they were contemporaries for thirty years, a 
full generation. In point of time, however, at least fifty years 
separated the " Euphues " and the "Discoveries," and the pro- 
gress made in style during that period is correspondent. Still, 



2T6 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

apart from Lyly's peculiar and more archaic vocabulary and 
sentence-structure, it does not seem to me fanciful to find a like 
simplicity and purity of expression in each. Jonson improved 
upon Lyly even more than Lyly had improved upon his prede- 
cessors, but I think that both may be rightly called in the words 
of John Eliot, "raffineurs de 1' heurs Anglais." 

— James M. Garnette. 

§ 126. John Milton— 1608-1674.. 

The divisions of Milton's literary life fall into three almost 
mechanically distinct periods as follows : Firstly, the times of his 
youth and minor poems ; secondly, his middle twenty years of 
prose polemics; and, thirdly, the times of his later muse and 
greater poems. 

First Period. — Had Milton died in 1640, when he was in his 
thirty-second year, and had his literary remains been then col- 
lected, he would have been remembered as one of the best Latin - 
ists of his generation, and one of the most exquisite of the minor 
English poets. In the latter character more particularly, he 
would have taken his place as one of that interesting group or 
series of English poets, coming in the next forty years after 
Spenser, who, because they all acknowledged a filial relationship 
to Spenser, may be called collectively Spenserians. 

In this group or series, counting in it such other true poets of 
the reign of James I and Charles I , as Phineas Fletcher and Giles 
Fletcher, William Browne, and Drummond of Hawthornden, 
Milton would have been entitled, by the small collection of pieces 
he had left behind, and which would have included his Ode o?i the 
Nativity, his U Allegro and 77 Penseroso, his Comus and his Lycidas, 
to recognition as indubitably the very highest and finest. There 
was in him that peculiar Spenserian something, which might be 
regarded as the poetic faculty in its essence, with a closeness and 
correctness in verbal finish, not to be found in the other Spense- 
rians, or even in the master himself. A very discerning critic 
might have gone deeper, as we can now. Few as the pieces were, 
and owning discipleship to Spenser as the author, he was a Spen- 
serian with a difference, belonging to his own constitution — which 
prophesied, and, indeed, already exhibited, the passage of English 
poetry out of the Spenserian order, that might be called the Mil- 
tonic. 

This Mil tonic something, distinguishing the new poet from the 









john mii/ton 277 

other Spenserians, was more than a mere perfection of literary 
finish. It consisted in an avowed consciousness already of the 
os magna sonitum, "the mouth formed for great utterances," that 
consciousness resting on a peculiar sub-stratum of personal char- 
acter that had occasioned a new theory of literature. " He who 
would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter on laud- 
able things ought himself to be a true poem," was Milton's own 
memorable expression afterwards of the principle that had taken 
possession of him from his earliest days ; and the principle of 
moral manliness, as the true foundation of high literary effort, of 
the inextricable identity of all literary productions in kind, and 
their co-equality in worth with the personality in which they had 
their origin, might have been detected, in more or less definite 
shape, in all or most of the minor poems. It is a specific form of 
that general Platonic doctrine of the invincibility of virtue which 
runs through his Comus, and which is summed up in the Miltonic 
motto of the closing lines :. 

Mortals that would follow me 
Love Virtue ; she alone is free ; 
She can teach you how to climb 
Higher than the sphery chime ; 
Or, if Virtue feeble were, 
Heaven itself would stoop to her. 

Second Pej'iod. — With regard to this second period, English 
scholarship and English literary criticism have not as yet suffi- 
ciently recovered from that inherited sycophancy to the Restora- 
tion , which has covered with a cloud the preceding twenty years 
of the ' ' Great Rebellion ; ' ' voting that period of English history 
to be unrespectable ; and all the phenomena of Presbyterianism, 
the Solemn League and Covenant, Independency, the Sects, Eng- 
lish Republicanism, and so forth, to be matters of absolute jargon, 
less worthy of attention than a Roman agrarian law, or the names 
of Horace's mistresses. When this unscholarly state of temper 
has passed away, there will be less disposition in England or in 
any writers to distinguish between Milton as the poet and Milton 
as the prose writer. While some may recognize, with the avidity 
of assent and partisanship, the fact that there are in Milton's prose 
writings notions of much value and consequence that have not 
yet been absorbed in the English political mind, there will be a 
general agreement, at least, as to the importance of those pam- 
phlets historically considered. 



278 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

It will be perceived that he was not only the greatest pamphle- 
teer of his generation, head and shoulders above all the rest, but 
also that there is no life of that time, not even Cromwell's, in 
which the history of the Great Revolution, in its successive 
phases, so far as the deep underlying ideas and speculations were 
concerned, may be more intimately and instructively studied than 
in Milton's Remains. Not only in his Areopagitica, admired now so 
unreservedly, because its main doctrines have become axiomatic, 
but of most of his other pamphlets, even those the doctrine of 
which is least popular, it may be said confidently, that they an- 
swer to his own definition of a " good book by containing some- 
how the precious life-blood of a master spirit." From the entire 
series there might be a collection of specimens, unequalled any- 
where else, of the capabilities of that older, grander, and more 
elaborate English prose, of which the Elizabethans and their im- 
mediate successors were not ashamed, though it has fallen into 
disrepute in comparison with the easier and humbler prose which 
came in with Dry den. 

Third Period. — Whilst it is wrong to regard Milton's middle 
twenty years of prose polemics as a degradation of his genius, and, 
while the fairer contention might be that the youthful poet of 
Comus and Lycidas actually promoted himself, and became a more 
powerful agency in the world; and a more interesting object in it 
forever, by consenting to lay aside his ' ' singing robes ' ' and spend 
a portion of his life in a great prose oratory, who does not exult 
in the fact that such a life was rounded off so miraculously at the 
close by a final stage of compulsory calm, when the "singing 
robes" could be resumed, and Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, 
and Samso?i Agonistes could issue in succession from the blind 
man's chamber. Of these three poems, and what they reveal of 
Milton, there is no need here to speak at length. Paradise Lost 
is one of the few monumental works of the world, with nothing 
in modern epic literature comparable to it, except the great poem 
of Dante. 

This is best perceived by those who penetrate beneath the beau- 
ties of the merely terrestrial portions of the story, and who recog- 
nize the coherence and the splendor of that vast symbolic phan- 
tasmagory, by which, through the wars in Heaven and the subse- 
quent revenge of the Archangel, it points out the connection of 
the whole visible universe of human cognizance and history with 
the grander, pre-existing and still environing world of the eter- 






ABRAHAM COWLEY 279 

nal and invisible. To this great epic the Paradise Regained is a 
sequel, and it ought to be read as such. The legend that Milton 
preferred the shorter epic to the longer one is quite incorrect. All 
that is authentic on the subject is the statement of Edward Phil- 
lips, that when it was reported to his uncle that the shorter epic 
was ' ' generally considered to be much inferior to the other he 
could not bear with patience any such thing." 

The best critical judgment now confirms Milton's own, and 
pronounces Paradise Regained to be not only within the possibili- 
ties of its briefer themes a worthy sequel to Paradise Lost, but also 
-one of the most edifying and artistically perfect poems in any lan- 
guage. Finally, the poem, in which Milton bade farewell to the 
''muse," and in which he reverted to the dramatic form, proves 
that to the very end his right hand had lost nothing of its power 
■and cunning. Samso?i Agoiiistes is the most powerful drama in 
our language after the severe Greek model : it has the additional 
interest of being so contrived that, without strain at any one point 
■or in any one particular, of the strictly objective incidents of the 
Biblical story which it enshrines, it is yet the poet's epitaph and 
his condensed autobiography. All in all, now that these three 
.great poems have drawn into their company the beautiful and 
more simple performances of his youth and early manhood, so 
that we have all his English poetry under view at once, the result 
has been that the man, who would have been to be remembered 
independently, as the type of English magnanimity and political 
courage, is laurelled also as the supreme poet of his nation, with the 
single exception of Shakespeare. 

§ 127. Abraham Cowley — 1618-1667. 

Cowley was the most popular English poet during the lifetime 
'of Milton. The learned quiet of the young poet's life was broken 
by the Civil War ; he warmly espoused the royalists' side. In 1643 
Cambridge became too hot to hold him, and he made his way to 
Oxford, where he enjoyed the friendship of Eord Falkland, and was 
tossed, in the tumult of affairs, into the personal confidence of the 
royal family itself. After the battle of Marston Moor he followed 
the Queen to Paris, and the exile so commenced lasted twelve years. 
This period was spent almost entirely in the royal service, "bear- 
ing a share in the distresses of the royal family, or laboring in 
their affairs. For this purpose he performed several dangerous 
journeys into Jersey, Scotland, Flanders, Holland, or wherever 



280 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

the King's troubles required his attendance. But the chief testi- 
mony of his fidelity was the laborious service he underwent in 
maintaining the constant correspondence between the last King 
and his wife. In that weighty trust he behaved himself with in- 
defatigable integrity and unsuspected security : for he ciphered 
and deciphered, with his one hand, the greatest of all the letters 
that passed between their majesties, and managed a vast intelli- 
gence in many other parts, which for some years together took up 
all his days and two or three nights every week." 

In spite of these labors, however, he did not refrain from literary 
industry. During his exile he met with the works of Pindar, and 
determined to reproduce their lofty lyric passion in English. At 
the same time he occupied himself in writing a history of the Civil 
War, which he completed as far as the battle of Newbury, but 
which unfortunately afterward was left unfinished. In spite of 
the troubles of the times, so fatal to poetic fame, his reputation 
steadily increased, and when, on his return to England in 1656, he 
published a volume of his collected poetic works, he found him- 
self without a rival in poetic esteem. This volume included his 
later works, and the Pindaric Odes, and some Miscellanies. 

The Pindaric Odes contain weighty lines buried in irregular 
and inharmonious masses of moral verbiage. Not one or two are 
good throughout, but a full poesy of beauties may be culled from 
them. The cadences of the Alexandrines, with which most of 
the strophes close, continued to echo in English poetry from Dry- 
den down to Gray, but the Odes themselves, which were found to 
be obscure by the poet's contemporaries, immediately fell into dis- 
esteem . The Mistress was the most popular poetic reading of the 
age, but it is now the least read of all Cowley's works. It was. 
the last and the most violent expression of the amatory affectation 
of the seventeenth century, an affectation which has been endur- 
able in Donne and other early writers, because it had been simply 
the vehicle of sincere emotion, but was unendurable, because 
in him it represented nothing but a perfunctory exercise, a mere 
exhibition of literary callisthenics. 

Throughout their parallel lives the fame of Cowley completely 
eclipsed that of Bacon, but posterity instantly and finally reversed 
the judgment of their contemporaries. The poetry of Cowley 
rapidly fell into a neglect, as unjustly as the earlier popularity had 
been. As a prose writer, especially as an essayist, he holds, and 
will not lose, a high position in literature: as a poet, it is hardly 



JOHN BUNYAN 281 

possible that he can enjoy more than a very partial revival. The 
want of nature, the awkward and obvious art, the defective melody 
of his poems, destroy the interest that their ingenuity and occa- 
sional majesty would otherwise excite. He had lofty views of the 
mission of a poet and an insatiable ambition, but his chief claim to 
poetic life is the dowry of a sonorous lyric style, which he passed 
down to Dry den, and his successors of the eighteenth century. 

§ 128. John Bunyan—1628-1688. 

John Bunyan was the son of a tinker, and brought up amidst 
ignorance, poverty and profanity. From his childhood he heard 
voices, saw visions, and was tortured with an overpowering sense 
of sin. At length, converted through the efforts of his religious 
wife, he became a Baptist, and devoted much of his time to the 
study of the Bible, of which he acquired a thorough knowledge. 
In the Civil War he took the side of Cromwell. Having become 
a leader among the Baptists, he was persecuted after the Restora- 
tion ; and for refusing to abstain from preaching was confined for 
twelve years in Bedford jail, where he wrote his famous allegory, 
the Pilgrim's Progress — first part being published in 1678 — which 
is perhaps more widely known than any other book except the 
Bible. On his release from prison he was chosen preacher of the 
Baptist congregation at Bedford, and became celebrated for his 
eloquent and impressive discourses. 

The Pilgrim's Progress has been translated into nearly all Eu- 
ropean languages, and is read with equal relish by old and young, 
learned and ignorant, rich and poor. It is Puritan to the core; 
and the Pilgrimage of Christian is but the record of the life of an 
ecstatic Puritan of the time, "seen through an imaginative haze 
of spiritualism, in which its commonest incidents are heightened 
and glorified." Bunyan 's other important works were the " Holy 
War," another religious allegory, and "Grace Abounding to the 
Chief of Sinners," a religious autobiography of remarkable in- 
terest. 

§ 129. The Pilgrim's Progress. 

With Milton the great Elizabethan age of imaginative poetry 
and the spirit of the New Learning said their last words. We 
might say that Puritanism also said its last great words with him, 
were it not that its spirit lasted in English, were it not also that 
for years after his death, in 1678, John Bunyan, who had pre- 



282 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

viously written much, published the Pilgrim's Progress. It is 
the journey of Christian the Pilgrim, from the City of Destruction 
to the Celestial City. We class the Pilgrim's Progress here, 
because, in its imaginative fervor and poetry and in its quality of 
naturalness, it belongs to the spirit of the Elizabethan times. 
It belongs also to that time in this, that its simple and clear form 
grew up out of passionate feeling, and not out of self-conscious 
art. It is the people's book, and not the book of a literary class, 
and yet it lives in literature, because it first revealed the poetry, 
which fervent belief in a spiritual world can kindle in the rudest 
hearts. In doing this, and in painting the various changes and 
feelings of the Pilgrim's progress to God, the book touched the 
deepest human interests, and set on foot a new and plentiful lit- 
erature. Its language is the language of the Bible. It is a prose 
allegory conceived as an epic poem. As such it admits the vivid 
dramatic dialogue, the episodes, the descriptions, and the clear 
drawing of types of character, which give a different, but an equal 
pleasure to a peasant boy and to an intellect like Macaulay's. 

— Stopford A. Brooke. 



Scholars of wide and critical acquaintance with literature are 
often unable to acquire an acceptably good, not to say an admirable 
style; and, on the other hand, men who can read only their own 
language, and who have received little instruction even in that, 
often write and speak in a style that wins or commands attention, 
and in itself gfves pleasure. Of these men John Bunyan is, 
perhaps, the most marked example. Better English there could 
hardly be, or a style more admirable for every excellence, than 
appears throughout the writings of that tinker. Xo person who 
has read the Pilgrim's Progress can have forgotten the fight of 
Christian with Apollyon, which, for vividness of description and 
dramatic interest, puts to shame all the combats with knights and 
giants, men and dragons, that can be found elsewhere in poetry or 
prose ; but there are probably many who do not remember, and not 
a few, perhaps, who in the very enjoyment of it, did not notice the 
clearness, the spirit, the strength, and the simply beauty of style 
in which that passage is written. For example, take the sentence 
which tells of the beginning of the fight : 

"Then Apollyon straddled over the whole breadth of the way, 
and said : I am void of fear in this matter ; prepare thyself to die; 



THE KINGS OF ENGLAND 283 

for I swear by my infernal Den that thou shalt go no farther ; here 
will I spill thy soul." A man cannot be taught to write like that 
nor can he by any study learn the mystery of such a style. 

— R. G. White. 

§ 130. Kings of Eiigland. 

THE STUARTS. 
James I — 1 603-1 625. 
Charles I — 1 625-1 649. 



THE COMMONWEALTH — 1 649- 1 66 1 

Charles II— 1661-1685. 
James II— 1685-1688. 



William and Mary — 1 689-1 702. 
Queen Anne — 1702-17 14. 



HOUSE OF HANOVER. 

George I — 17 14-1727. 
George II — 1 728-1 760. 
George III — 1760-1820. 
George IV — 1 820-1 830. 
William — 1 830-1 837 . 
Queen Victoria — 1837 — 



§ 131. The Puritan Age — 164.0— 1660. 

Puritanism exercised more or less influence over English 
Politics, English Religion and English Literature during the 
greater part of the seventeenth century; but it culminated in the 
Commonwealth decade, when national government, creed and 
intellect were essentially moulded to its theological dogmatism. 
The age was not long enough to embrace the entire lives of its 
representatives nor of all their works. Milton, Bunyan and Baxter 
lived to be persecuted and condemned by the succeeding antago- 
nistic era, with whose profligacy and liberality they had no sym- 
pathy. Paradise Lost, the epic of Puritanism, Pilgrim's Progress, 
the allegory of Puritanism, and many of Baxter's polemical writ- 
ings in defense of Puritanism, did not appear until after the Res- 



284 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

toration : they were like strangers in a foreign land and among 
foreign manners. 

Puritanism austerely suppressed secular tastes and amusements. 
All public entertainments were forbidden ; Parliament closed the 
the theatres, and had the actors publicly whipped ; poetic festivals 
were prohibited ; while even the May-pole dance and the innocent 
sports of children — games, dancing and wrestling and bell-ring- 
ing — were sternly put down; sculpture and painting were de- 
nounced as idolatrous ; and the pictures and statues were destroyed. 
Everything was condemned as impious and profane, whilst elo- 
quence and composition and classical taste were rejected as un- 
godly. Religious ecstasy took the place of reason ; philosophy 
and intellectual pursuits were narrowed down to theological con- 
troversy. Under such a condition of things an extensive and 
abundant literature could not exist. Ordinary poetry could not 
issue from such a conception of life : the drama was exiled ; and 
philosophy was abandoned as untrustworthy. But out of this 
artistic desolation sprang three powerful writers, whose natural 
genius spontaneously supplied them with those requisites of liter- 
ary art which their surroundings and opinions condemned — Mil- 
ton, the isolated Puritan poet; Bunyan, the master of allegory; 
and the eloquent preacher, Richard Baxter. 

"John Milton is not the highest, but the most complete type of 
Puritanism." His life covered the entire period in which Puri- 
tanism was a distinct element in English affairs : just as it is inde- 
pendent in his characteristics of other epochs in English history, 
so his immortal epics stand apart by themselves in English litera- 
ture, unparalleled and unrivalled. Paradise Lost and Paradise 
Regained are world poems, and bear comparison with Homer's 
Iliad or Dante's Divina Commedia. 

The Prose Literature during the time of the Civil War and of 
the Commonwealth was of a religious nature, and on account of 
its abundance and excellence the period has been styled "The 
Augustan Age of English Divinity." Foremost among the Puri- 
tan theologians was Richard Baxter — 1615-1691 — a distinguished 
defender of English liberty. His zeal exposed him to persecu- 
tion, and under James I he experienced the cruelty of Jeffreys. 
His most famous works are "The Saints' Everlasting Rest," and 
"A Call to the Unconverted." 

But the greatest theological writer of the seventeenth oentury, 
and by general consent, the most eloquent pulpit orator of the 



THE TRANSITION PERIOD 285 

English Church, was Jeremy Taylor — 1 613-1667. He was op- 
posed to Puritanism, and several times imprisoned during the 
Commonwealth. Charles II, at his restoration, bestowed on him 
the bishopric of Down and Connor, in Ireland, and soon after he 
became Privy Councillor and Vice-Chancellor of Trinity Cgllege, 
Dublin. His well-known treatise — 1647 — "On the Liberty of 
Prophesying ' ' — was the first famous plea for tolerance in religion 
on a comprehensive basis and on deep-seated foundation ever made. 
Two other popular works were "On the Rule and Exercise of 
Holy Living," published in the first years of the Commonwealth. 
His sermons are among the finest religious writings in the range 
of literature, and are distinguished for their poetic eloquence. 
Other theologians, who figured prominently as defenders of the 
English Church against Puritanism, were Thomas Fuller — 1608 
-1661 ; Sir Thomas Browne — 1605-1682; Leighton, Tillotson, 
Barrow 7 , and Robert South of the succeeding age. 

§ 132. The Transition Period. 

This period embraces nearly half a century, the reigns of 
Charles II, James II, William and Mary. As compared with the 
periods preceding, it is one of decline, as it is also far inferior to the 
era immediately following. During this period there were stages 
in the process of transition, and it may be necessary at the outset 
to note their nature, and the application of the term now before us. 

Transitions in general are historical and literary, and appear in 
the development of every nation's mental life. It is these changes 
to which Mr. Hallam refers in speaking of the general history of 
the European mind — its best and worst epochs. He says : ' ' There 
is, in fact, no security, as the past history of mankind assures us, 
that any nation will be uniformly progressive in science, art and 
letters, nor do I perceive, whatever may be the current language, 
that we can expect this with much greater confidence of the whole 
civilized world." Such a remark is made from no pessimistic 
view of the defeat of truth on the earth, or the relation of Provi- 
dence to human progress, but rather from the undeniable lesson 
of the world's experience, that all that is known is subject to 
change. This is precisely what Disraeli would call the principle 
of "crises and reactions," as founded in nature and ratified by 
history. In no department of mental inquiry and study is this 
principle more patent and influential than in literature. No im- 
portant kind of literature, of ancient or modern times, has failed 
to exhibit it. 



286 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

If Italy had her golden age of Tasso and Ariosto, she had, as 
well, the reactionary age that followed it in the seventeenth century. 
The age of Cervantes in Spain was closely followed by that of Gon- 
gora; while the classical eras, both of France and Germany, were 
alike preceded and followed by epochs of mental weakness or lit- 
erary indifference. In the history of English Letters, both in 
prose and poetry, this law of action and reaction is manifest. In 
the First English Period, it is seen in connection with Danish and 
Norman invasions ; in the Middle Period, at the time of the Eng- 
lish and French wars ; and in the modern era, at successive epochs, 
such as the Civil Wars and the Revolution now before us. 

In fact, the history of England might be divided into two 
periods of permanence and of transition, acting upon each other 
and interacting. The former are so fixed, and their character 
so revealed, that but little difficulty is found in correctly inter- 
preting them. The latter are more perplexing to the literary 
student and, yet, full of interest and most important in relation to 
what precedes and follows. These transitional epochs would 
seem to have a life and history of their own, and give origin to 
many questions of peculiar interest. Why in Letters they occur 
just when they do ; why they are long or short in duration ; why 
they appear at somewhat irregular intervals along the development 
of literature, and why they should be, now from the better to the 
worse and now the opposite, are queries which belong to the phi- 
losophy of literary history, and are at this moment the subject of 
careful study on the part of the best English critics. President 
Bascom, in his discussion of English Literature, speaks of two of 
these transition periods : the one being that era now in question, 
and the other the second half of the eighteenth century. What 
he calls ' ' The Retrogressive Period ' ' — the period from the open- 
ing of the fifteenth to the middle of the sixteenth — might also be 
called by the same name. Mr. Taine, in his "English Litera- 
ture," less formally, but with equal certainty, marks the appear- 
ance and disappearance of these eras in our prose and poetry. 

The appropriateness of the term to this era is seen from its un- 
settled character. The Revolution of 1640 had closed with the 
execution of Charles I. The stormy days of Cromwell then 
followed. After that, in the era before us, there came the civil 
disorders under the Second Charles and the Second James, ending 
in the Revolution of 1688, in the reign of William and Mary. 
For more than a half century the nation was distracted. The 



THK TRANSITION PKRIOD 287 

period was purely revolutionary, either by the presence of a home 
or a foreign strife. Even when for a time there seemed to be 
peace and settled order, the quiet was purely external, and there 
was constant danger of an outbreak. It was an age of violent 
extremes in thought and in life. In the Church, the struggle was 
between Puritan and Prelate, Protestant and Papist, Presbyterian 
and Independent. In the State, the Royalists and the Roundheads 
opposed each other. In society, morality was confronted with 
open profligacy, while in literature, ability and character struggled 
to hold their own against mediocrity, and the lower aesthetic tastes 
of the times. At no era of English history can such clashing 
interests be found. Revellers and Seekers, Rationalists and Free 
Thinkers, Fifth Monarchy-men and Fanatics, were all active for 
precedence. It is not strange that Dry den, the central literary 
figure of the time, especially in poetry, exclaimed with true feeling ; 
Must England still the scene of changes be, 
Tost and tempestuous, like an ambient sea? 

There was no moderation in the age. The golden mean was 
never reached by any sect in Church or State. Monarchy need 
not be despotic, but the Stuarts became so. Prelacy may exist 
without interfering with the subjects' freedom, and Puritanism 
can be held without offending the world by its moroseness ; but 
it was not thus. Bad men were especially bad, and good men 
were good to a fault, in the mode of the expression of their good- 
ness. There was no unity. All was divergent and one-sided, un- 
natural and transitional. What the age was in Church and State 
and in Society, it was in Literature, and in Prose Literature it was 
an age of extremes. If we find keen and telling satire against the 
vice of the age, we also find, and even from the same pen, the 
most abject adulation of the great ones in the land. High moral 
teachings strangely mingle with debasing maxims, while through- 
out the era, the shocking absence of any high order of English, 
prose, as continuing the formative prose of the earlier period, 
make it manifest that such literature had come to a sudden cessa- 
tion. The literary as well as the social continuity was broken, 
and, for a time, the best minds of the age must either look back 
to the days of Milton or onward to those of Addison, to be cheered 
in their work as prose authors. 

The characteristics of its Prose under one aspect were Franco- 
English or Anglo-Gallic. The satirical Butler, who was especially 
sensitive of this feature of English in his time, speaks of England 



288 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

as ' ' going to school to France. ' ' The expression may be taken as 
literally true. There were special reasons why Gallic influence 
was peculiarly strong at this epoch. It was the golden age of 
French literature, and an inferior age of English literature. It 
was but comparatively a short time before the Restoration of 
Charles II that the French Academy was established, in 1636, 
under the sagacious policy of Richelieu, as the centre of French 
culture, and in the middle year of this era it was in its glory. It 
w 7 as but natural that the influence of the French school at such a 
time should be far-reaching, and that it pervaded England. To 
this it must be added, that an exiled king going to France attracted 
numbers with him, and both he and they veritably went to school 
to France. On their return to England there began a kind of 
Franco-English dynasty, and English literature received then and 
there a Gallic impress, from which it will never be entirely free. 

Indeed some benefit resulted, but the issue was mainly evil as 
it regards our poetry and prose. The special misfortune lay in 
the fact that whatever may have been the apparent relation of the 
countries and of their literatures, they were at heart utterly at 
variance. There are no two national characters more unlike than 
the English and the Gallic. They are not necessarily hostile, as 
the German and Gallic are, but they are uncongenial. It was so 
in the eleventh century — 1066 — when a kind of coalition was 
effected at the point of the bayonet. Even Dry den, with all his 
classic and continental tendencies, saw this and deplored it. He 
thus entreats his fellow authors to be national as Englishmen : 

Let us our character maintain ; 

'Tis of our growth to be sincerely plain. 

The advice was ingenious, but of no avail, while Dryden himself 
sinned against his own theory. Nothing could have been more 
harmful in its effects on English prose than such an influence in 
such an era. Our prose was in process of formation. From the 
time of Ascham to that of Milton and Bunyan this formative 
work had not been materially checked. It was continuous and 
promising ; and just about to take shape permanently, not only as 
prose, but as English prose. Foreign French influence now enters, 
not only to delay, but to direct and modify the plastic work — to 
turn the course of prose development into a new channel — to make 
it a mixed English prose. Elizabethan prose had many defects 
incident to its character as formative, but with all its faults it was 
superior to that which followed. Instead of the natural, fresh 



INFERIORITY OF THE DICTION 289 

expression of the earlier English, there appears the formal, 
courtly style of the foreign school, and all is changed for the 
worse. Rarely, if ever, has our literature been so sadly affected 
by outside agency. Under other social and historical conditions, 
the influence might have been overruled and rendered salutary. 
As it was, it was baleful. 

In Chaucer's time, French influence was strong. In the time 
of Henry VIII, Italian influence was strong, as was Germany later 
in our history. All these influences, however, were under the 
control of the home literature at the time. In the days of the 
later Stuarts, it was partly the shame, and mainly the misfortune 
of England, that it was a dependency of France — that its authors 
were the vassals of Gallic leaders. This explains another feature 
of the prose, patent to every careful reader. 

§ 133. Inferiority of the Diction. 

English Prose was what Swift aptly termed a ' 'jargon. ' ' Double 
and doubtful senses were purposely given to words ; partly as an 
exercise in frivolous wit, and partly as the natural result of the 
inferior ability behind the language. Brevity of statement was 
carried to such an extreme as to defeat its own end, and became 
the veriest buffoonery and burlesque. In fine, it was a form of that 
old Euphuism which flourished in the first period, but which, 
coming to England through France, had taken a new phase even 
more revolting to good taste, in which Lyly and Donne were entirely 
outdone. The diction was mainly in the line of verbal device or 
display — the result both of mental and moral perverseness — and 
well adapted to thwart, for the time being, any advance in native 
prose. Just in the degree to which it was bombastic and pedantic, 
it was un-English, and marked an ever wider departure from 
earlier models. It cannot be denied that the vocabulary of our 
prose was largely increased in this half century of transition ; but 
there are some things better for a literature than mere increment 
of words. The verbal gain was not all the gain, since it involved 
the addition of elements which have worked only harm in the 
province of English Prose. 

All this in addition was fully in keeping with the trivial temper 
of the times. The age was not serious. Why should its authors 
be? The violent reaction from Puritan precision had set in, inten- 
sified and prolonged by influences from the Continent. King and 
courtiers were alike corrupt, and Satan was abroad in poetry. 
20 



290 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Cowley and Waller were absorbed in writing effeminate verses for 
characteristic ladies. In the drama especially, Wycherly is preferred 
to neglected pla}^s of Shakespeare, while in the sphere of solid 
prose anything is admissible, so it reminds one not of duty and 
moral responsibility. 

The phraseology of the time expressed the superficial character 
of the time. Most of those who wrote did what they did as the 
exponents of the hour ; and it is not strange that it was in such 
times as these that John Milton ended his da}^s in disappointment 
and neglect, while third and fourth-rate versifiers and prosers were 
in honor at court and among the people. He had fallen on "evil 
days and evil times." So had English Letters. 

§ 134. The Helpful Agencies of This E? r a. 

It is not to be supposed, however, that even in this period of 
transition and general decline, there were no forces at work on 
behalf of a sound literature and the development of a clear and 
substantial prose. One or two of these are conspicuous in their 
influence. The popular agitation of thought and life has been 
already noted in speaking of the revolutionary character of the 
time and on the side of its danger and disadvantages ; but it has 
another side, and one equally important. Agitation in itself is 
healthful and stimulative when exercised with regard to proper 
objects, and confined within reasonable limits; and thus under 
control it has always tended to strengthen, rather than to weaken. 
Even when but partial^ fulfilling those conditions, it is produc- 
tive of good in so far as it does fulfill them, and serves to expose 
the evil resulting from lawless insurrection. 

It is quite natural here that just as the Formative Period of our 
Prose closed with political and popular agitation in the persons of 
Cromwell and the Puritans, so this period of Transition, begin- 
ning with the general excitement attendant upon the return of 
Charles II, and continuing in the bitter feuds of the times of 
James II, ended, in the reign of William and Mary, with the great 
Revolution of 1688. Whatever the Commonwealth agitation did 
for the first era in the line of a stalwart and trenchant prose, this 
final and pervasive Revolution did far more. It settled the ques- 
tion among others, which, in their religious, political and social 
leanings, cannot be overestimated; and which in the realm of the 
literature, then transitional, did a potent and enduring good. It 
settled the relation of the Romish to the Protestant Church in 



THE HELPFUL AGENCIES OF THIS ERA 291 

England as one of subjection rather than of supremacy; and it 
also settled the basis of Constitutional Government as opposed to 
despotism or absolute monarchy. It introduced and guaranteed 
the doctrine of popular rights in such wise, that it has not been 
permanently disturbed since that era. 

The effect of this agitation on the native prose was extremely 
happy and healthful. It gave it just what it needed at the time — 
a literary spirit, flexibility, force, manliness, positiveness and free- 
dom of expression. It recovered that Protestant and Evangelical 
time under William of Orange, which it had formerly possessed 
under Elizabeth and Cromwell, and had lost under Charles II and 
James II. It regained that native English temper and vigor, 
which, in the interval of Stuart rule, had been impaired by ex- 
cessive foreign influence. More than all, it recovered something 
of that ethical purity which had so marked it in former days, as 
distinct from the gross literature of the Continent. 

Not only was the Revolution of 1688 the most important one in 
English history, but equally so in English Prose. It broke away 
the barriers which a despotic and civil polity had raised, and bade 
the English people go out into a wider area and on a better his- 
tory. The nation began to breathe a purer air and to live. Men 
thought independently of others ; and spoke and wrote as they 
thought. Just as soon as the outward agitation ceased and mat- 
ters settled into civic and social order, the authors of the time, 
who had been repressed and hampered, at once awoke to the splen- 
did issues before them, and the future of English Letters was 
assured. It is noticeable just here, as in the days of the Protecto- 
rate, that such healthful agitation expressed itself mainly in prose, 
rather than in poetry. In each of these periods, Formative and 
Transitional poetry was prevalent at the opening, but prose at the 
close ; and in each this order was in keeping with the agitated char- 
acter of the times and the special demand for honest, earnest words. 
In such an era authors must for a while forego the pleasure of poetic 
invention and the indulgence of imaginative powers, and resort to 
that straightforward method of expression which obtains in prose 
discourse. Eocke and Temple, South and Sydney, Bentley and 
Collins, could have written at that time in no other form than in 
prose. The gravest questions of Church and State, of society and 
letters were before them, and there was but one medium of their 
expression. 



292 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

§ 135. Personal Character and Works of Leading Minds. 

The traditional era, bad as it was, was not given over entirely 
to evil men and agencies. Now, as ever in English history, 
strong opposition was manifested, and so strong at times as to 
prevail. Special meed is due to those men who, in such a time, 
sternly contended for sound morals and good letters, and wrought 
patiently in the sphere of native authorship. One of the special 
features of the period is seen in the defensive attitude assumed by- 
some of the prose authors of the time against the prevailing de- 
generacy. Their efforts were to conserve what was already theirs. 

Inferior as the era in some respects was, it is safe to assume, 
that there is scarcely an able writer of that time in English didac- 
tive prose, who was not upon the side of mental and moral reform. 
It was because they were so outnumbered by the host of secoiidary- 
authors and men, that the results are not more apparent. Even 
Dryden, whose main work was in poetry, and who in that sphere- 
too often transgressed the limits of propriety, was in his prose 
more discreet and classic. As far as he went in that direction,, 
he was able, helpful ; and had he continued his prose work beyond 
mere Prefaces, Dedications, Translations, and Epistles, might, 
have gained a conspicuous place among his countrymen. If 
Thomas Hobbes — 1 558-1 679 — was writing in the interest of a 
false philosophy, Ralph Cudworth — 1617-1688, John Eocke — ^ 
1 63 2- 1 704, and Sir Isaac Newton — 1 642-1 727, opposed him. 
If some were addicted to the French, most of the best writers 
were loyal to their English ancestry and speech. A brilliant 
order of English Prose is not to be expected in such a period. 
The conditions did not exist. It is creditable to find even a sec- 
ond order of prose writers who, amid all discouragements, main- 
tained their ground and preserved, to some extent, at least, the 
continuity of English letters. If the era was transitional, it had 
reference to what was to follow it as well as what had preceded 
it. The best that can be said of it is, that as we go steadily on 
from the opening to the close of it through forty -two years, 
English Prose at the end of it — in 1702 — seemed to be on a better 
basis after all than even before ; and we can discern more easily- 
than ever the character of the future that awaited it. 



JOHN DRYDEN 293 

§ 136. John Dry den — 1631-ijoo. 

Dryden first emerged from obscurity with his Heroic Stanzas to 
the memory of Cromwell, the Protector, who died September 3, 
1658. That these stanzas should have made him a name as a poet 
does not appear surprising, when we compare them with Waller's 
Verses on the same occasion. Dryden took some time to consider 
them, and it was impossible that they should not give an impression 
of his intellectual strength. Donne was his model; and it is 
obvious that both his ear and his imagination were saturated with 
Donne's elegiac strains when he wrote ; yet when we look beneath 
the surface, we find unmistakeable traces that the pupil was not 
without decided theories, that now ran counter to the practice of 
his master. It is plain that not by accident each stanza contains 
one clear-cut point. The poem is an academic exercise; and it 
seems to be animated by an under-current of strong contumacious 
protest against the irregularities tolerated by the authorities. 
Dryden had studied the ancient authorities for himself, and their 
"method of uniformity and elaborate finish commended themselves 
to his robust and orderly mind. In itself the poem is a magnifi- 
cent tribute to the memory of Cromwell. Now that the glittering 
style of the so-called ' ' metaphysical poets ' ' has gone very far out of 
fashion, it requires an effort, a deliberate dismission of prejudice, 
to enjoy such a poem. 

A poet writing at the present day on such a man would present 
his grandeur in a much more direct and simple way. Yet judged 
in the spirit of its own style, Dryden 's is a noble poem. The 
recognition of Cromwell's greatness is full and ample.' The 
thought in each stanza, the inclosing design of each of the parts 
of the edifice, is massive and imposing, although the massiveness 
is not presented in its naked simplicity so as to hold the foremost 
place in the eye — the gaze being arrested by glittering incidents, 
so that the essential greatness of the mass is disguised and dimin- 
ished. We are not invited to dwell upon the grand outline ; we 
are not called upon to surrender ourselves to its simple impres- 
siveness ; but it is there, although the author does not insist upon 
it and rather deprecates it, waives it off and challenges our 
admiration of some artificial centre of attraction. It is the 
ornamental centre upon which the art of the poet has labored, not 
the effect of the massive whole. Still there is a loftiness and a 
nobility in the scope of the work, if our prejudice in favor of a 
less adorned workmanship permit us to feel it. 



294 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

From a moral point of view, Dryden's next appearance as a 
poet is not creditable. To those who regard the poet as a seer 
with a sacred mission, and refuse the name altogether to a literary 
manufacturer to order, it comes with a certain shock to find Dry- 
den, the hereditary Puritan, the panegyrist of Cromwell, hailing 
the return of King Charles the Second in his Astraea Redux, 
deploring his long absence and proclaiming the despair with which 
he had seen the "rebel thrive, the royal crost." From a literary 
point of view, also, this poem is very much inferior to the 
Heroic Stanzas. Dryden had need of Waller's clever excuse that 
it is easier to praise a bad man than a good one, because the 
essence of poetry is fiction. And it was not merely in thus hasten- 
ing to welcome the coming guest and recant all praise of his rival 
that Dryden showed a shameless accommodating spirit, and placed 
himself in such unpleasant contrast to the greater poet, who was 
waiting his fall in all but friendless blindness. It might have been 
expected of one, with his Puritan connections and scholarly train- 
ing, that, if he purposed making his living by the stage, which 
was restored under Charles II, his literary as well as his moral 
conscience would have required of him to make some effort to 
raise, or at least not lower, its tone. 

But Dryden seems to have had no higher ambition than to 
make some money by his pen. Naturally he first thought of 
tragedy, his own genius, as he has informed us, inclining him to 
that species of composition ; and in the first year of the Restora- 
tion he wrote a tragedy on the fate of the Duke of Guise ; but 
soon after his abandonment of heroic couplets in tragedy, he 
found new and more congenial work for his favorite instrument in 
satire. As usual, the idea was not original in Dryden, though he 
struck on with his majestic step and energy divine, and immedi- 
ately took the lead. His pioneer was Mul grave's Essay on Satire \ 
an attack on Rochester and the Court, circulated in 1679. Dryden 
himself was suspected of the authorship and cudgelled by hired 
ruffians as the author ; but it is not likely that he attacked the 
king on whom he was dependent for the greater part of his income. 

It was indeed a new thing for the public to have the leading- 
men of the day held up to laughter and indignation, which a little 
trouble enabled them to penetrate. There was no compunction in 
Dryden's ridicule and invective. Delicate wit was not one of his 
gifts : the motions of his weapons were sweeping and the blows 
hard and trenchant. The advantage he had gained in his recanta- 



JOHN DRYDEN 295 

tion was fully used in his portraits of Shaftesbury and Buckingham, 
in his Achitophel and Zimri. In these portraits he shows consider- 
able art in the introduction of redeeming traits to the general out- 
line of malignity and depravity. Three other satires, with which he 
followed up Absalom and Achitophel ', dealt with smaller game than 
his masterpiece. 

Dry den's next poem in heroic couplets was in a different strain. 
On the accession of James II, in 1685, he became a Roman 
Catholic. There has been much discussion as to whether this 
conversion was or was not sincere. It can only be said that the 
coincidence between his change of faith and change of patron was 
suspicious. The force of the coincidence cannot be removed by 
such pleas as that his wife had been a Catholic for several years, 
or that he was converted by his son, who was converted at Cam- 
bridge, even if there were any evidences of these statements. 
Nothing can be clearer than that Dryden all his life through re- 
garded his literary powers as a means of subsistence, and that he 
had little scruple about accepting a brief on any side. 

The Hind and the Panther, published in 1687, is an ingenious 
argument for Roman Catholicism, put in the mouth of " a milk- 
white hind, immortal and unchanged." There is considerable 
beauty in the picture of the tender creature, and its enemies in the 
forest are not spared. One can understand the admiration that 
the poem received when such allegories were in fashion. It was 
the chief of the veneration with which Dryden was regarded by 
Pope, who himself educated in the Catholic faith, was taken as a 
boy of twelve to see the veteran poet in his chair of honor and 
authority at Will's Coffee House. The poem was also very open 
to ridicule, and was treated in this spirit by Prior and Montigu, 
the future Earl of Halifax. 

Dryden 's other literary services to James was a savage reply to 
Stillingneet, who had attacked two papers published by the King 
immediately after his accession ; the one said to have been written 
by his late brother in advocacy of the Church of Rome ; the other 
by his wife explaining the reasons for her conversion, and a trans- 
lation of the life of Zainer in prose. 

Dryden did not abuse his new faith on the Revolution, and so 
lost his office and pension as laureate and historiographer royal. 
For this act of constancy he deserves credit, if the new power 
would have considered his services worth having after his frequent 
apostacies. His rival Shad well reigned in his stead. Dryden was 



296 KNGUSH LITERATURE 

once more thrown upon his pen for his support. He turned again 
to the stage, and wrote the plays which we have enumerated. The 
;great feature in the last decade of his life was the translation of 
the Classics. When he took his farewell of the stage, in 1694, he 
announced his intention of devoting himself to a translation of the 
whole of Virgil. On this he seems really to have labored, and 
great expectations were formed of it. It was published in 1697 
' and proved to be a great success ; and soon after its publication he 
wrote one of his masterpieces, the second Ode on St. Cecilia's Day. 
His next work was to render some of Chaucer's and Boccaccio's 
tales and Ovid's Metamorphoses into his own verse. In the same 
year he published a translation of the Satires of Juvenal and Per- 
sius. 

Dryden's conversion to Catholicism had a great, although indi- 
rect, influence in the preservation of his fame. It was this which 
gained him the discipleship and loving imitation of Pope. He 
thus became by accident, as it were, the literary father and chief 
model of the greatest poet of the next generation. If his fame 
had stood simply on his merits as a poet, he would in all likeli- 
hood be a much more imposing figure in literary history than he 
is now. The splendid force of his satire must always be admired, 
but there is surprisingly little of his vast writings that can be con- 
sidered worthy of lasting remembrance. He showed little of 
inventive genius. He was simply a masterly litterateur of immense 
intellectual energy, w T hose one lucky hit was the first splendid ap- 
plication of heroic argument. Upon this lucky hit supervened 
another — the accidental discipleship of Pope. He lent his gifts 
of verse to the service of politics, and his fame profited by the 
connection. It would, of course, be unjust to say that his fame 
was due to this, but it was helped by this. Apart from the 
attachment of Pope, he owed to party also something of the favor 
of Dr. Johnson and the personal championship and editorial zeal 
Of Scott. — WlIvLIAM Minto. 

§ 137. The Modern Spirit — 1650-1700. 

Classicism in England during the seventeenth century was not 
so much the expression of mere satiety, of rebellion against the 
grotesqueness and eccentricity which had preceded it, as it was 
the manifestation of the modern spirit in literary development : 
the same spirit whose presence may be distinctly perceived in the 
expansion of the sciences and the wonderful unfolding of political 



THE MODERN SPIRIT 297 

consciousness during this same period. Puritanism was in its 
leading features an energetic assertion of the modern spirit, 
though marred by those inconsistencies and aberrations which are 
the characteristics of all essential innovations upon established 
order and ancient precedent. Let us select 1642 as a critical point 
in its development and notice the strange connexion of events in 
this momentous year. In 1642 Galileo dies, and Sir Isaac New- 
ton is born; Richelieu, the great apostle of absolutism, is called 
to his account ; and the war, precipitated by the invincible per- 
fidy and stupid obstinacy of Charles I, begins with the setting up 
of the royal standard at Nottingham. In all this complexity we 
see the manifestation of the modern spirit in the development of 
physical science by scholars and thinkers during the distractions 
of the Civil War ; in the vital issues involved in the great con- 
flict, as well as in the breaking down of the ponderous syntax, 
and the dissolution of our "overflowing" stanza. 

The Civil War of 1 642-1 646 was merely the first hostile phase 
of the struggle that transformed England from an absolute to a 
constitutional monarchy. The aims of the leading spirits in the 
Long Parliament were essentially one with those that animated 
the less heroic men of 1688, who consummated the labors which 
the reformers of 1640-41 had only begun. Under these varying 
aspects of progressive life, political, scientific and literary, there 
prevails a unity of spirit as impressive as it is unmistakable. The 
entire political development of the seventeenth century, from the 
assembling of the Long Parliament in 1640 to the Revolution in 
1688, was critical or regulative in character, the Revolution itself 
being a criticism of the constitution, an endeavor to ascertain and 
fix in precise forms and definite propositions its scope and extent. 
The famous Bentley-Boyle controversy was another exhibition of 
the dominant spirit. Even during the Restoration, when there 
was an apparently hopeless revulsion in favor of absolute mon- 
archy, the action of the same progressive temper is clearly dis- 
cernible. The student of Macaulay, Buckle and Green will re- 
quire no confirmation of this statement. 

We hold then that the transformation experienced by our prose 
and poetic writers in the breaking down of our ancient syntax 
and the dissolution of the old stanza, were analogous and coordi- 
nate movements, not the outcome of a satiated fancy, but rather 
one phase of the prevailing critical or rationalistic temper of the 
English intellect during the seventeenth century. Literary style 



298 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

participated in the general movement — it accommodated itself to 
the spirit of the incoming dispensation, for literature is the "art- 
istic expression of what men think and feel." The modern spirit 
has tended towards obscure, bold and well sustained individuality 
in literature, as perhaps in some degree, in all forms of human ac- 
tivity. With its disposition to substitute the general for the spe- 
cial, the abstract for the personal and the concrete, we discover 
the probable explanation of the descents of the supreme monarchs 
of song from their thrones. It was not so much reaction or 
satiety as the dominion of a spirit that discouraged the colossal 
individuality of Shakespeare, and tolerated, if it did not foster, the 
commonplace and the mediocre. 

There is no just cause of astonishment, that with the extension 
of such a temper, Shakespeare should have suffered a partial 
eclipse during more than a century, and the terse but trite coup- 
lets of Pope should have become the recognized ideals of grace 
and elegance in poetic diction. Writers approached more nearly 
the average intelligence of their patrons; and a reading public, 
if not created, was at least stimulated by the peculiar tone of the 
discussion elicited during the Revolution of 1688. It is the es- 
sentially commonplace nature of so many of Pope's utterances 
that have engrafted them so firmly upon the structure of our 
speech. In this regard let him be contrasted with Milton. His 
popularity as a master of graceful and finished platitudes outlived 
the shock of the romantic revival, which marked the closing of 
the eighteenth century. 

Most prominent in this age, both in prose and verse, was the 
exaltation of form over matter. Finished and correct style, 
which had been more or less sought after by the writers of the 
Restoration, became a mania in the early part of the eighteenth 
century. Indeed, so much energy was expended in polishing 
diction, balancing periods and elaborating metaphors, that little 
remained to be employed on ideas. Commonplace matter met 
with applause, if its phraseology came up to the critical standard 
of the time. This classical spirit pervaded all departments of 
literature ; it perfected English prose, but it dwarfed the drama, and 
made poetry mechanical and artificial. The age has been more 
diversely criticised than any other in English literature. Its con- 
temporary critics, as well as those of the succeeding age — particu- 
larly Dr. Samuel Johnson — praised it to excess, overestimated its 
influence, and pronounced it the Augustan Age ; while writers of 



ALEXANDER POPE 299 

the nineteenth century have censured it severely for its polite 
scepticism, condemned its artificiality, and denounced it as an age 
of utilitarianism and satire. 

§ 138. Alexander Pope — 1688-17 4.4.. 

That classical correctness of style which Dryden had introduced 
culminated under Pope, and degenerated into artificiality under 
his imitators. He is the greatest didactic poet in the language. 
He absorbed and reflected all the elements spoken of under party 
literature . Born in 1688, he wrote excellent verse when he was 
twelve years of age; the Pastorals appeared in 1709, and two 
years afterwards he took full rank as a critical poet in his Essay 
on Criticism , in 1 7 1 1 . The next year saw the first cast of his 
Rape of the Lock, the Epos of Societ}^ under Queen Anne, and the 
most brilliant display of wit in English. This closed what we 
may call his first period. 

He now became known to Swift and to Henry St. John, and 
L,ord Bolingbroke who was also a writer. With these, and with 
Gay, Parnell, Prior, and Arbuthnot, Pope formed the Scriblerus 
Club, and soon rose into great fame by his Translation of the Iliad 
and Odyssey under George I — 17 15- 17 25 — for which he received 
,£7,000. He, now being at ease, lived at Twickerham, where he 
had completed his Homer. It. was here, retired from the literary 
mob, that in bitter scorn of the many petty scribblers, he wrote 
in 1728 the Dunciad, altered and enlarged it in 1741. It was the 
fiercest of his satires, and it closes his second period, which took 
much of its savageness from the influence of Swift. 

The third period of Pope's literary life was closely linked to his 
friend, Bolingbroke. It was in conversation with him that he 
originated the Essay on Man — 1732-17 34 — and the Imitations of 
Horace. The Moral Essays, or Epistles to men and women, were 
written to praise those whom he loved, and to satirize the bad 
poets and the social follies of the days, and all who disliked him 
or his party. In the last days of his life, Bishop Warburton, the 
writer of the Divine Legation of Moses and editor of Shakespeare, 
helped him to fit the Moral Essays into the plan of which the 
Essay on Man formed a part. Warburton was Pope's last great 
friend; but almost his only friend. By 1740 nearly all the mem- 
bers of his literary circle were dead, and a new race of poets and 
writers had grown. He died in 1744, aged fifty-six years. 

He is our greatest master in didactive poetry, not so much 



300 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

because of the worth of his thoughts as because of the masterly 
manner in which they are put. The Essay on Man, though its 
philosophy is poor and not his own, is crowded with lines that 
have passed into daily use. The Essay on Criticism is equally full 
of critical precepts, put forth with exquisite skill. The Satires 
and Epistles are also didactic. They set virtue and cleverness 
over against vice and stupidity, and they illustrate both by types 
of character, in the drawing of which Pope is without a rival in 
our literature. 

The translation of Homer is made with great literary art, but 
for that very reason it does not make us feel the simplicity and 
directness of Homer. It has neither the manner of Homer nor 
the spirit of nature. The Heroic Couplet in which he wrote his 
translation, and nearly all his works, with a correctness that has 
never been surpassed, but it sometimes fails from being too 
smooth, and its cadences too regular. 

In two directions, in that of condensing and pointing his mean- 
ing, and in that of drawing the utmost harmony of sound out of 
the couplet, Pope carried versification beyond the point at which 
it was when he took it up. Because after Pope, his trick of versi- 
fication became common property, we are apt to overlook the 
merit of the first invention . But epigrammatic force and musical 
flow are not the sole elements of Pope's reputation. The matter 
which he worked up into his verse has a permanent value, and is 
indeed one of the most precious heirlooms which the eighteenth 
century has bequeathed us. 

And here we must distinguish between Pope when he attempts 
general themes, and Pope when he draws that which he knew — 
the social life of his own day. When in the Pastorals he writes 
of natural beauty, in the Essays on Criticism he lays down the 
rules of writing ; and in his Essay on Man he versifies Leibnit- 
zian optimism, he does not rise above the herd of eighteenth cen- 
tury writers, except in so far as his skill of language is more ac- 
complished than theirs. It is where he comes to describe the one 
thing which he knew and about which he felt sympathy and antipa- 
thy — the Court and town of his time — in the Moral Essays and 
the Satires and Epistles, that he found the proper material on 
which to lay out his elaborate workmanship. Where he moralizes 
or deduces general principles, he is as superficial, second-hand, 
one-sided as the veriest scribbler. Wherever he recedes from 
what was immediately close to him, the manners, passions, pre- 



THK CLASSICAL AGE 301 

judices, sentiments of his own day, Pope has only such merit — 
little enough — as wit divorced from truth can have. He is at his 
best only where the delicacies and subtle felicities of his dictions 
are employed to embody some transient phase of contemporary 
feeling. The complex web of society, with indefinable shades, 
its minute personal affinities and repulsions, is the world in which 
Pope lived and moved, and which he has drawn, in a few vivid 
lines, with a keenness and intensity with which there is nothing 
in our literature that can compare. 

— Mark Pattison. 

§ 139. The Classical Age — 1700-1745. 

This embraces the literature from Queen Anne, from 1702 to 
17 14, and of the first Georges — George I, from 171410 1727, and 
of George II, from 1727 to 1760. 

With the closing years of William III and the accession of 
Queen Anne, in 1702, a literature arose, which was partly new 
and partly a continuation of that of the Restoration. The con- 
flict between those who took the oath to the new dynasty and the 
non -jurors who refused, the hot blood that produced it, the war 
between Dissent and Church, and between the two parties which 
now took the names of Whig and Tory, produced a mass of polit- 
ical pamphlets, of which Daniel Defoe's and Swift's were the 
best; of songs and ballads, the Lillibidleros , which were sung in 
every street; of squibs, reviews, satirical poems and letters. 
Every one joined in it, and it rose into importance in the work of 
the greater men who mingled more literary studies with their 
political excitement. In politics all the abstract discussions we 
have mentioned ceased to be abstract and became personal and 
practical, and the spirit of inquiry applied itself more closely to 
the questions of every-day life. The whole of this stirring liter- 
ary life was concentrated in London, where the agitation of so- 
ciety was hottest ; and it is around this vivid city life that the 
literature of Queen Anne and of the two following reigns is best 
grouped. 

With few exceptions it was a Party Literature. The Whig and 
Tory leaders enlisted on their sides the best poets and prose writers, 
who fiercely satirized and unduly praised them under names thinly 
disguised. Personalities were sent to and fro like shots in battle. 
Those who could do this work well were well rewarded, but the 
rank and file of writers were left to starve. Literature was thus 



302 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

honored, not for its own sake but for the sake of party. The 
result was that the abler men lowered it by making it a political 
tool, and the smaller men, the fry of Grub Street, degraded it also 
in the same way, only in a baser manner. Their flattery was as 
abject as their abuse was shameless, and both were stupid. They 
received and deserved the merciless lashing which Pope was soon 
to give them in the Dimciad. 

Being a party literature, it naturally came to study and to look 
sharply into human character and into human life as seen in the 
great city. It discussed all the vanities of social life, and painted 
town society more vividly than was done before or has been since ; 
and it was so wholly taken up with this that country life and its 
interests, except in the writings of Addison, were scarcely touched 
at all. The society of the day was one in which all subjects of 
intellectual and scientific inquiry were eagerly debated, and the 
wit of society was stimulated by its party spirit. Its literature 
reflected this intellectual excitement, and at no time in English 
history was literary work so vigorous and masculine on the 
various problems of thought and knowledge. Criticism being so 
active, the form in which thought was expressed was now especially 
dwelt on, and the result was that the style of English prose became, 
for the first time after many years, absolutely simple and clear 
again, and English verse reached a neatness of expression and a 
closeness of thought as exquisite as it was artificial. At the same 
time, and for the same reason, Nature, Passion and Imagination 
decayed in poetry. 

§ 140. The Literature of the Eighteenth Century. 

To facilitate the study of eighteenth century literature, it is 
convenient to divide the hundred and twenty years which suc- 
ceeded the Restoration into three equal parts. Each of these is 
dominated by one figure of far greater intellectual prestige than 
any other of the same period. No one will question that the first 
of these is Dryden and the last that of Johnson. It may not, per- 
haps, be quite so readily conceded that the age of Anne lay under 
the tyranny of Swift. It will, however, be found, I think, upon 
close examination that neither Pope nor Addison has an equal 
claim to be considered the centre of the action or the hero of the 
story. They wrote with consummate skill, but Swift it was who 
laid the torch to the standing-corn of thought ; his was the irradi- 
ating, Promethean mind from 1700 to 1740, and his the force of 



THE LITERATURE OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 303 

character, the thrill of personal genius, that rivets to itself the 
main attention of students throughout that brilliant period. 

The age of Dryden was the most prosaic in our literary history. 
In its course theology, philosophy, and even poetry itself, were 
chained either to common-sense, or to a ranting rapture which dis- 
pensed with literary sincerity, and was, in fact, more prosaic than 
all prose. What mainly flourished under the strong leader sceptre 
of Dryden was satire, in new and strongest forms ; artificial 
comedy, brutal at first, and harsh, but polished at length to the 
last extremity of cynical elegance; burlesque verses, very smart 
and modern, which passed for poetry ; the political pamphlet ; the 
clear, limpid art of the letter -writer, modelled through Roger 
L' Estrange, on the directness of the Lettres Portuguese; the sincere, 
naked thought of Locke, with the dislike of ornament and care- 
lessness of authority; the first grotesque babble of modern 
critisism; the dryness of polemical divines, and over it all, cover- 
ing its defects as with a garment, the new graces of the competent 
current prose of the day. This is the vestibule of the eighteenth 
century, and across its very threshold the rich brocaded wit of 
Congreve takes hands with the urbanity and grace of Addison. 

The age of Swift is fuller of intellectual activity, more general, 
more varied, more enthusiastic. The coldest period is over, and 
already a faint flush of the summer romanticism is discoverable. 
This fuller life takes many forms. In philosophy the age is 
no longer content with the bold presentment of Locke's ideas, 
but, with something less of positive originality, calls to its aid the 
fancy and ingenuity of Shaftesbury, and the brilliant imagination 
of Berkeley. In poetry, though the general type is artificial, still 
there is no longer the protracted cultivation of one form ; satire 
takes urbaner and less brutal shapes, and half way through the 
period, the landscape poets push in with their blank verse, and 
lyrists with their octosyllables. The drama somewhat abruptly 
expires, and while the nation is waiting for the development of 
the novel, Addison holds its ear with the humor and dainty senti- 
ment of his Essays. A delicate amenity, a sweetness of expression, 
marks the age of Anne ; and even the ferocities of Swift and 
Mandeville do not belie the general impression of the increasing 
civilization of the mind, and the very wounds inflicted by these 
writers show the tenderness of the contemporary epidermis. Such 
satire would not have penetrated a generation grown pachyderma- 
tous under the flail of Oldham or Lord Dorset. There was a 



304 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

rapid development of the power of ridicule in prose and verse, a 
general sharpening and pointing of every literary weapon ; and it 
was in this age of Swift that English prose reached the maximum 
of strength, elegance, and elasticity combined. 

Something was again relinquished in the third period, that of 
Johnson. Here, to secure more strength, needless weight was 
superadded to language ; elasticity was lost in a harmony too 
mechanically studied. What was really best in this third age was 
directly recovered from the early Anne writers, as Goldsmith, its 
best author, is seen returning to the traditions of Addison and 
Congreve. The main contribution of this period to literature is 
the novel, which opens with Pamela, in its first year, 1741. Before 
the generation closed the earliest development of fiction was over, 
and the novel in decline. In verse, what was not imitative of the 
old schools was suggestive of what did not come till the next 
century began. On the one hand, we have Goldsmith, Johnson, 
and Churchill reviving the manner of Pope ; on the other, we have 
Gray and Collins in their odes, and Chatterton, in his verse ro- 
mances, prophesying of Coleridge and Shelley. Everywhere during 
this period the buried and forgotten seeds of romantic fancy were 
becoming stimulated, and were pushing their shoots above ground 
in a Percy's Reliqnes, in a Castle of O Iran to, or in a Descent of Odin. 
Meanwhile, what was mainly visible to the public was the figure 
of Dr. Samuel Johnson, a sesquipedalian dictator, not writing 
very much or in a superlatively excellent manner, but talking 
publicly, or semi-publicly, in a style hitherto unprecedented, and 
la}dng down the law on all subjects whatever. Around this great 
man collects whatever there is of moral genius in the generation, 
— Goldsmith and Burke, Gibbon and Reynolds, Boswell and Gar- 
rick — and a group is formed for the student of personal manners, 
the most interesting that literary history can supply. So rich is 
the age in anecdote, so great in literary prestige, that the student 
must look closely and carefully to perceive that it is rapidly de- 
clining in intellectual force of every kind, and by 1780 is only 
waiting for the decease of two or three old men to sink completely 
into a condition of general mediocrity. When Dr. Johnson dies, 
the literature of the eighteenth century is practically closed, and 
the work of removing the debris to prepare for the nineteenth 
begins. 

It was in the fulness of time, when the drama had totally de- 
ceased, when the essay of the age of Queen Anne was also in com- 



THE LITERATURE OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 305 

plete decline, when new airs were beginning to blow from the land of 
romance, when Thomson's landscape and Young's funereal mystery, 
the starry speculation of Berkeley, and the daring imagination of 
Swift, had prepared men's minds for what was less mundane, less 
superficial than the observation of material facts, that the Novel 
of Feeling began to take its place. It was welcomed from the very 
first. So weak and faulty a book as Pamela must be confessed to 
be, it awakened instant and universal enthusiasm, and all mistakes 
of execution were forgotten in the European acclamation which 
hailed Richardson as a great creative talent. It was fortunate for 
our literature that he was immediately succeeded, and accompanied 
by a man of genius still greater than his own; and these two, 
Fielding and Richardson, remain, after a century and a half, in 
spite of the immense cultivation of the Novel, acknowledged 
masters as well as founders of this vast branch of literature, not 
superseded and scarcely surpassed by the Scotts and Dumas, the 
Thackeray s and Tolstois, the race of great giant novelists that 
have sprung from their loins. 

In a general survey of English poetry, from 1660 to 1780, the 
first thing that strikes us is, that without ceasing to be either 
popular or abundant, poetic work has become, and remains to the 
close of the eighteenth century, subordinated to prose, and of a 
second order of interest. This was a new thing. Until the end 
of the sixteenth century literature in England, broadly spreading, 
was in verse, and we chronicle its fluctuations without special 
regard to anything but the quality of this kind of writing. With 
the Elizabethan period, prose begins to take a very great promi- 
nence, and to claim a large place in the history of English style ; 
this place, however, until the Commonwealth, is decidedly sub- 
ordinate to that occupied by verse. Shakespeare is, on the whole, 
a more luminous figure than Bacon, and Spenser than Hooker; 
while, if we go further down in the ranks, the superiority of the 
poets becomes more and more obvious. We may take an image 
from the light-house service. The Elizabethan poets carry white 
flags, the prose-men carry red ones; and as we recede from them 
all the red rays do not seem to penetrate so far as the white ones. 
But with the Restoration this state of things ceases : the art of 
verse becomes monotonous and mechanical, the prose- writers 
assert themselves more, are brighter, more various, and more enter- 
taining, and, though the poets are slow to lose their personal 
prestige, the poetic art is no longer paramount. If Dryden domi- 
21 



306 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

nates the first age, he was a great prosaic as well as a great poet ; 
Swift, though a hardy rhymester, does not live among the poets 
at all ; and Jonson is only admitted by personal favor, on the 
credit of two paraphrases of Juvenal, among the ranks of those 
who put on singing raiment. Verse is very prominent throughout 
the eighteenth century, but it plays the part of Mascarille in the 
comedy of literature. It is no longer the master, but the enter- 
taining and irrepressible domestic, of the imagination. 

The eccentricity and lawlessness of seventeenth century poetry 
are now recognized even by those who exaggerate its qualities of 
simplicity, naivete, and nobility. The necessary reaction which, 
followed the lyrics of Quarles, the epics of the Fletchers, the trage- 
dies of Goff and Cartwright, stranded English poetry high and 
dry on the shore of common sense. Where invention had been 
strained into monstrosity, a decent servility of imagination began 
to reign, and a generation of readers, whose taste had been posi- 
tively tortured, enjoyed a complete respite from enthusiasm, famil- 
iarity and surprise. In Dryden the English nation found the best 
possible leader of the chorus for a condition so peculiar. 

The poetic genius of this man was eminently robust and unro- 
mantic ; sustained at a considerable but never a transcendental 
height, his shoulders were broad enough, and his patience great 
enough, to support the poetry of his country through a period of 
forty years, when all that was most essential was, that after so 
many violent oscillations the tradition of verse should for one 
whole generation be unruffled, and that nothing should be done 
to destroy the hold which poetry still continued to maintain, 
wounded and shaken as it had been, upon the respect of men of 
average intelligence. In order to do this it was necessary to secure 
a strong popular poet of little invention, indisposed to formal 
experiment of any kind, more desirous to accompany public taste 
than to lead it, and such a poet the Restoration revealed in the 
panegyrist of the Coro?iation. When the entire generation had 
passed away, the same voice was heard, merely mellowed to a 
deeper cadence, in the nervous couplets of Cymon and Iphigenia. 
The long dictatorship of Dryden, uninspiring as it seems, in vari- 
ous superficial degrees, ought to be regarded with gratitude by 
every lover of English. Had Dryden been other than he was, or 
had his life been cut off in early manhood, it is difficult to see what 
could have prevented our brilliant national literature from sinking 
into fantastic ruin and expiring in a sort of frenzied Gongorism. 



THE LITERATURE OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 307 

From the age of Anne onward the sole object of interest, to the 
student of broad effects, is the gradual development, as from a 
grain of mustard-seed, of the mighty tree of Naturalism. The 
prosaic poetry of rhetoric which stands, like the Cathedral of 
Chartres, with its two great towers, the one solid and majestic, the 
other a miracle of grace and lightness, is an object of definite 
critical interest. But when we pass Dryden and Pope, we reach a 
long stretch of country, where no poetical structure of complex 
significance meets us, until we arrive at the temple of Wordsworth 
and Coleridge. During the sixty years which intervene, much 
was done of a beautiful and accomplished character, but the inter- 
est of it is either confined to its relation with the past or to its 
intuition of the future. The verse of Goldsmith and Churchill 
has to be considered in the light of Pope, that of Gray and Cowper 
in the light of Coleridge : all the tract between 1 740 and 1 800 is 
covered with accidental, diffused, and tentative work in verse, the 
work of a period virtually preserved from anarchy only by its lack 
of animation. 

The conditions of the Drama during the period we are consider- 
ing were, in some degree, analogous to, but much more extraordi- 
nary than those of non-dramatic poetry. Between 1660 and 1700, 
the English stage cannot be called sterile or inanimate, nor was it 
supported only by the prestige of a single man. Both in its tragic 
and its comic departments it was crowded with figures, enjoyed a 
lively professional existence which was also literary, and produced 
a body of work, which is very large in quantity and not despicable 
in quality. 

The dramatic literature of the Restoration is an important frag- 
ment of the literature of England, and if it contains but two 
names, those of Otway and Congreve which are in the first rank, 
it boasts of a whole galaxy of the second and third. Tragedy 
had the marks of decrepitude upon it, but it was alive until the 
day of Southerne; sentiment, character, passion, though all 
clouded by a prevailing insincerity of style, were presented. A 
gulph divides such a drama as Crowne's Thyestes from Douglas or 
the Revenge, a gulph on the earlier side of which are all the tra- 
ditions of poetry and literature. Of comedy there is still more to 
be said. To Etheredge belongs a merit above that of any other 
poet of the age, that of introducing into England a new and vig- 
orous form of imaginative art. Needless to say that this was the 
Comedy of Manners, sweeping away the old decayed Comedy of 



308 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Humours, and giving us in its place something of Moliere's love 
of truth and penetration of character. Through Wycherley, Con- 
greve, and Vanbrugh this school rose to proportions genuinely 
considerable; but from the first the English stage, unable to per- 
ceive the charm of the purity of French comedy, had denied our 
scenes with a cynicism that grew to be intolerable, and the English 
comedy of manners fell before an incursion of indignant Puritanism. 

This fall of comedy is an extraordinary phenomenon. In 1699, 
England had possessed the most vigorous and vivacious school of 
comic dramatists in Europe: ten years later the chorus was 
absolutely silenced, or vocal only in the feeble pipe of Colley 
Cibber. Through the remaining years of the eighteenth century, 
dramatic vitality was accidental and sporadic : a good play ap- 
peared from time to time, but there was no school of dramatic 
literature, no school of capable literary writers for the stage. 

Some hints of the modern drama, pure and simple, are to be 
met with in writers who scarcely demand a word from the histo- 
rian for their personal merits. A Moorgate jeweller, George 
Lillo, amused the town with some perfectly unreadable plays, 
principally George Barnwell and the The Fatal Curiosity, which 
are interesting as the first specimens of " tragedie bourgeoises or 
modern Melodrama. 

These artless dramas were composed in the interests of morality 
and virtue, and are the parents of a long line of didactic plays of 
crime and its punishment. Of somewhat the same character were 
the sentimental comedies, imitated from the ' ' comedies larmoy antes ' ' 
of Ea Chaussee. There were various other innovations, mostly 
of a non -literary or anti -literary kind, such as the introduction of 
popular Opera early in the reign of Anne, and the fashion for 
Pantomimic drama, which came in some forty years later. 

All tended to sever more and more completely the marriage be- 
tween literature and the theatre, and to destroy that art of drama 
which had existed until the close of the seventeenth century. The 
four or five best plays of the eighteenth century are comedies in 
which Goldsmith, Colman and Sheridan have deliberately gone 
back to the Congreve and Wycherley tradition, and have re- 
sumed, with reprehensible elements omitted, the style and method 
of the great comedians of manners. But these are exceptions, 
and only enough to prove the rule of dramatic insignificance in 
England from 1700 onward. 

The condition of England had since late in the Renascence 



THE LITERATURE OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 309 

afforded no general opportunities for the cultivation of purely pro- 
vincial literature until the eighteenth century began. The exist- 
ence of work in dialectics, or inspired by provincial feeling, 
became from that time forth too evident to be overlooked. But it is 
the revival of letters in Scotland which is likely, first of all, to 
attract the notice of a student, and it is the more necessary to 
dwell on this because the revival, although more important than 
any of its class, was at first so imitative and remained so feeble 
until near the end of the century, that it may easily be lost sight 
of in the glare of English literature. There went out a curious 
struggle between pure Scotch and classic Englishmen, who as 
Ramsay of Ochtertyre puts it, "spoke their mother tongue with- 
out disguise," finding it exceedingly difficult to suppress their 
native idiom, when they came to emulate the Spectator ox the Tat- 
tler. 

The worst of it was that the Scots ' tongue was looked upon as 
rude and contemptible, and for a long time even the preaching 
and the practice of Allan Ramsay did not contrive to make the 
dialect fashionable. The revival of popular poetry came at last, 
and culminated splendidly in Burns. The use of Scotch prose, 
except by the novelists in dialogue, has never been seriously 
accepted, and probably never will be. — Towards the close of the 
eighteenth century America began to supply herself with a species 
of literature, which, _ however, gave at first but little promise of 
all she has done within the last hundred years. By far the most 
eminent of the early American writers was Franklin, whose works 
first collected in 1779, Only just come within our chronological 
limits. Franklin's style is notoriously graceful and charming, 
but he is almost the only American writer before the Independence, 
who can be named with the recognized masters of eighteenth cen- 
tury English. It is curious to reflect that in 1780, a date which 
to the historian of English literature seems late indeed, neither 
Washington Irving nor Bryant, neither the father of American 
prose nor the father of American poetry was yet born. 

This so-called classic age of England has long ceased to be re- 
garded with that complacency which led the most flourishing part 
of it to adopt the epithet ' ' Augustan. ' ' It will scarcely be denied 
by its greatest admirer, if he be a man of wide reading, that it can- 
not be ranked with the poorest of the five great ages of literature. 
Deficient in the highest intellectual beauty, in the qualities which 
awaken the fullest critical enthusiasm, the eighteenth century will 



310 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

be enjoyed more thoroughly by those who skim the entire surface 
of literature. It has, although on the grand scale condemned as 
second-rate, a remarkable fulness and sustained richness which 
endear it to specialists. If it be compared, for instance, with the 
real Augustan age in Rome, or with the Spanish period of literary 
supremacy, it may claim to hold its own against these rivals in 
spite of their superior rank, because of its more copious interest. 
It has neither a Horace nor a Calderon, but it has a great extent 
and variety of writers just below these in merit, and far more 
numerous than what Rome or Spain can show during those blos- 
soming periods. It is, moreover, fertile at far more points than 
either of these schools. 

This sustained and variegated success, at a comparatively very 
low level of effort, strikes one as characteristic of this age more 
remarkable for persistent vitality than for rapid and brilliant 
growth. The Elizabethan vivida vis is absent; the Georgian 
glow has not yet dawned ; but there is a suffused prosaic light of 
intelligence, of cultivated form, over the whole picture; and dur- 
ing the first half of the period, at least, this is bright enough to be 
very attractive. 

Perhaps, in closing, the distinguishing mark of eighteenth cen- 
tury literature may be indicated as the mastery of prose as a ve- 
hicle of general thought. It is customary to note the Restoration 
as marking the point where English prose took a modern form . 
This is true, but there was nevertheless much left to reform in the 
practice of authors. At the close of the reign of Charles II we 
find the most accomplished prose-writer of the age still encumber- 
ing himself in the toils of such sentences as this : 

"That which is not pleasant to me, may be to others who judge 
better, and to prevent an accusation from my enemies, I am some- 
times to imagine that my disgust of low comedy proceeds not so 
much from my judgment as from my temper, which is the reason 
why I so seldom write it ; and that when I succeed in it, I mean 
so far as to please the audience, yet I am nothing satisfied with 
what I have done, but am often vexed to hear the people laugh 
and clap, as they perpetually do, where I intended no jest, while 
they let pass the better things without taking notice of them . ' ' 

A hundred years later such a sentence had become an impossi- 
bility. It is not merely that we should search Burke or Robert- 
son in vain, at their weariest moments, for such a flaccid chain of 
clauses, but that the ordinary newspaper-man, the reporter or 



PATHOS 3 1 1 

inventor of last night's speeches, would no longer endure this 
clumsy form, this separation of the noun from its verb and the 
pronoun from its noun. It was the work of the period, which we 
roughly describe as the eighteenth century, to reform and regulate 
ordinary writing. It found English prose antiquated, amorphous, 
without a standard of form ; it left it a finished thing, the com- 
pleted body, for which subsequent ages could do no more than 
Weave successive robes of ornament and fashion. 

— Edmund W. Gosse. 

§ 141. Pathos. 

Noble as is Milton's famous sonnet, the Massacre in Piedmont, 
the following eloquent praise of it is adequate to the subject. The 
new and nobler purpose to which Milton puts the sonnet, is here 
in its splendor : in his hand the thing became a trumpet when he 
blew soul-animating strains, yet with what homely materials is the 
effect produced ! Not only is there a single purple patch in the 
wording; but of thought or image, all that there is, is a borrowed 
thought, and one repeatedly borrowed, viz: Tertullian's saying, 
"The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church." It would 
not be impossible, but it would be sacrilege, to point to distinct 
faults in this famous piece ; yet we may say that, with a familiar 
quotation for its only thought, and with diction almost below 
ordinary, its forceful flood of suppressed passion sweeps along the 
hackneyed Biblical phrases of which it is composed, just as a 
swollen river rolls before it the worn pebbles long ago brought 
down from the mountain side. From this sonnet we may learn 
that the poetry of a poem is lodged somewhere else than in its 
matter, or its thoughts, or its imagery, or its words. Our heart 
is here taken by storm, but not by any of these things. The poet 
hath breathed on us, and we have received his inspiration. In 
this sonnet is realized Wordsworth's definition of poetry: "the 
spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling." However frequently 
repeated it will never lose its pathos, either here or elsewhere. 
Thus it breaks forth : 

Avenge, O Lord, Thy slaughtered saints, whose bones 
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold ; 
Even them who kept Thy Truth so pure of old, 
When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones. 
Forget not : in Thy book record their groans 
Who were Thy. sheep, and in their ancient fold 
Slain by the bloody Piedmontese that rolled 
Mother and with infant down the rocks. Their moans 



312 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

The vales redoubled to the hills, and they 
To Heaven. Their martyred blood and ashes sow 
O'er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway 
The triple tyrant ; that from these may grow 
A hundred-fold, who, having learned Thy way, 
Early may fly the Babylonian wo. 

The works of George Eliot, for instance, present us with speci- 
mens of wit, humor, imagination, tragic power, poetry, and the 
most subtle and delicate observation . But the one literary beauty 
which we should remark as lacking to them is Pathos. Perhaps 
the exclusion may appear to imply some peculiar use of the word ; 
and words are used so vaguely, that the attempt to confine it to its 
specific meaning may possibly be peculiar. We understand by it. 
that slight, delicate touch which, reaching below the region of 
idiosyncrasies, and penetrating to the depths of purely human 
emotion, surprises the spring of tears; not perhaps bidding them 
to flow — that depends on temperament — but rousing in every one 
the peculiar blending of emotion and sensation, which tears manifest 
and relieve. It must be transient. The feeling it evokes is swal- 
lowed up immediately in something that is not itself. It hovers 
on the edge of pity, but as it passes into pity it ceases to be pathos. 
It is entangled with the web of memory, but when we take up 
that thread, the pathetic touch has ceased to vibrate. All that is 
strongly individual is without it: it must be simple, it must be 
human, for it seems to us especially connected with the animal 
world, and one reason why we find none on the page of our great 
novelist is that the influence of a peculiar individuality is felt there 
too strongly. It is gone at the first approach of anything of the 
value of analysis, and we question whether a certain sense of inade- 
quateness be not inseparable from it. The feeling represented, 
at all events, must always be associated with a certain dumbness ; 
it is the appeal made to us, whether in life or in some representa- 
tion of life, by a sorrow that reveals itself unconsciously. We 
mean, of course, unconsciously to the sufferer; it is not necessary 
that the creator of the pathetic work should be ignorant of what 
he does, though he often is so; as far as he stands outside the 
feelings he expresses, it is not necessary that his note should be 
sounded unconsciously more than any other ; the indispensable 
condition is only that the reader should look at the sorrow from 
afar. As we try to describe the feeling we are closely reminded 
of the etymological connection between dimness and dumbness. 
What we mean by pathos brings home to the mind of the person 






PATHOS 3 1 3 

who feels it the sense of both these things ; the clear daylight, 
the distinct utterances, effectually dispels it. Where eloquence 
begins, it ends. 

Pathos, if we have rightly described it, is not preeminently the 
characteristic of any first-rate genius . To find a writer whose produc- 
tions it characterized, we must turn to some shy, reserved nature, 
with whom it is not merely a dramatic effect, but, what is a very 
different thing, an actual outcome of the character. And we do 
not, accordingly, find much of it in Shakespeare, in proportion to 
the wealth of every kind which we find in his works. But we 
may take from him specimens of the wealth in which he is poorest, 
and one scene from King John, which will occur to every 
reader as an apparent refutation of the limitations we have given 
to the scope of pathos, affords, in fact, a good illustration of our 
meaning. The lament of Constance for Arthur is the specimen of 
pathos, perhaps most universally appreciated, and it is undeniable 
that she cannot be called dumb. We have known her lament in 
dramatic representation made extremely clamorous, and though 
such a conception seemed to us very injurious to the beauty 
of the situation, it certainly did not destroy its tear-compelling 
power. But no small part of the wonderful power of the picture 
seems to us to consist of the dumbness of Arthur, the slightness 
and faintness of the sketch, the truth, in a' certain sense, of his 
own words : 

Good, my mother, peace ; 

I am not worth that coil that's made for me ! 

And in the case of Constance herself, our sympathy is solely with 
the mother. It is the pure human feeling — nay, it is the one 
emotion we share with the creatures below humanity that is made 
interesting. If the reader imagines how an artist of lesser genius 
would have treated the grief of a bereaved mother, he will see 
that it is touched with wonderful temperance, though with such 
great impressiveness. The few lines beginning, "Grief fills the 
place up of my absent child," touch on the anguish of every 
bereaved heart ; they open a vista to every reader to some re- 
membered longing ; they put before us the sorrow that belongs not 
to rich or poor, high or low, wise or foolish, but to all. And yet 
how few they are, how soon we turn to other things, how little is 
Shakespeare engrossed with that pathetic image ! He gives us an 
indirect glance at it, and hurries on to the interests of a nation. 
It is interesting in the case of the only dramatist who can be 



314 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

named on the same page with Shakespeare, to observe how the 
pathos of this indirect glance, fades away when it becomes direct. 
Antigone seems to us the grandest female figure in dramatic liter- 
ature, but the only time she is brought forward in a pathetic light 
is in her first appearance as an unconscious child. Pathos cannot 
combine with the full diapason of tragic power: those flute-like 
notes are lost in any flood of harmony ; their melody is soon over, 
but for the moment it must be heard alone. 

The age which we should choose as richest in accessible speci- 
mens of pathos, the eighteenth century, is of itself a good illustra- 
tion of the power that lies in this indirectness of alteration. This 
period has of late been much rehabilitated, but its poetic claims 
have not yet been brought forward ; and its best friends will con- 
fess that it was, on the whole, an age of prose. But the poetry 
of a prosaic age is exactly that which is most likely to be pathetic . 
It supplies the inevitable elements of reserve — of dumbness, we 
would rather say — without which pathos is swallowed up in some- 
thing beyond itself. And to take Gray as the type of this kind of 
poetry, the few words of one of his friends quoted by Matthew 
Arnold, and recurrent in his essay on Gray, as a sort of refrain — 
' ' he never spoke out ' ' — express with wonderful happiness and 
simplicity, not only the characteristic of a particular poet, but the 
characteristic of all "to whom we would apply the epithet "pa- 
thetic . ' ' Hackneyed as they are — and it is a peculiar disadvan- 
tage to poetry to be hackneyed — his ' ' Blegy ' ' and the ' ' Ode on a 
Distant Prospect of Eton College ' ' keep for all readers that dim 
sense of far-off troubles and sorrows which seem to bring ' ' some 
painless sympathy with pain. ' ' No poetry is more purely abstract- 
edly human ; the dim vision of the cottage door gladdened by the 
father's return, of the hay-fields alive with schoolboys, touching 
as they do on two extremes of society, contain nothing that is 
individual, nothing that is not absolutely common to humanity. 

Where Gray does diverge into individuality he seems to us most 
unfortunate, and the picture of the indolent day-dreamer, of whom 
we learn that "large was his bounty and his soul sincere," while 
yet "he gave to misery all he had, a tear," exchanges poetry for 
something that, if we could forget its beauty of language, we 
should perceive to be twaddle. The whole interest of the poem 
is that common life is here, as it were, set to music. The dim, 
obscure lives of toil and privation are brought before us, not in 
their painful sordidness, and not in their arduous effort and meri- 



PATHOS 3 1 5 

toriotis success either, but in their broad human interest, as lives 
of those bound together by strong affections, rejoicing in the daily 
meeting, busied with each other's need, seeking on the bed of 
death a last glance from the eyes fullest of love. It takes nothing 
from the simplicity of this broad human interest that the words 
which call it up are essentially those of a scholar, and that we 
might restore some of its gems to their original setting on the 
pages of Lucretius or Tacitus. On the contrary, it adds much to 
it. It gives that indirectness of attention which is what we want. 

Turn from Gray to Wordsworth, concentrate your attention on the 
lives of the poor, and you may gain much, but the pathetic touch is 
gone. If, for instance, any one fresh from the passage to which 
we have alluded should read Wordsworth's " Michael," which is 
nothing more than the hint at peasant life expanded into a little 
biography, and assert that he found as much pathos in the portrait 
as in the .sketch, all we could say would be that he and we mean 
different things by the word. When we are invited to contem- 
plate a specimen of humanity at that nearness, in which we can 
discern such special facts as that the parents were advanced in life 
when the son was born, and that they lost their money through 
the treachery of an acquaintance, we are apt to feel that the pic- 
ture, being as individual as it is, is not individual enough. The 
present writer, at least, confesses to feeling very often that Words- 
worth has lost one excellence and not fully gained the other. 

The contrast between the two, at any rate, is an instructive one 
for our purpose. Wordsworth and Gray, from this point of view, 
may be considered as representing the nineteenth century and its 
predecessor. That Wordsworth was the greater poet, though 
that is at least not a disqualifying circumstance for this represen- 
tation, we leave out of the question : we consider them only with 
regard to their contribution to this particular kind of literature. 
Wordsworth represents what is best in modern democracy. He 
looks at the poor not as the picturesque retainers, the grateful 
dependents of their social superiors ; he sees in them specimens of 
humanity interesting on their own account ; but he often fails to 
render his picture of them interesting, because he specializes what 
is characteristic of the class without specializing what is charac- 
teristic of the individual. Where he aims at pathos he some- 
times drops into prosaic triviality. We should have expected 
most of his readers to agree with us in thus describing his "Alice 
Fell," if Mr. Arnold had not included the verses in his selection 



316 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

from the poet. The attempt to describe in poetry such an inci- 
dent as a child having her cloak caught in a coach wheel and 
replaced by a benevolent passenger, seems to us, we must say, in 
spite of this formidable vote on the opposite side, a very good 
illustration of what pathos is not. It might almost be set by the 
side of the caricature of Wordsworth in the ' ' Rejected Addresses ' ' 
as a specimen of what is puerile when it should be childlike. The 
incident is too trivial for the most passing allusion, but the 
homely, every-day sorrows of the poor may be most pathetic 
when shown us by the light of a far-off sympathy, transient as the 
gleam that fringes a flying shower, while yet, if hammered at 
through six or seven verses, they become simply tedious. De- 
scribe the incidents of a village at which the ' ' Elegy ' ' glances 
from afar, and you have your choice between being tedious, and 
exchanging the broad human view for one that takes cognizance 
of idiosyncrasies ; and Wordsworth seems to us so much afraid of 
the last alternative that he has constantly chosen the first. If you 
expand the fitting subject for the allusion of half a line into a 
theme of a poem, you will in either case eliminate from it the 
pathetic elements. 

The contrast between the two poets brings out the explanation 
of our poverty in this direction, and its connection with the demo- 
cratic spirit of our age. It is a two-fold connection. In the first 
place all literature feels the direct influence of the political spirit 
of the age. It is true that we should not expect the influence of 
democracy to be hostile to pathos ; an attention to the needs of the 
poor and the obscure would appear, at first sight, its moral cor- 
relative ; and this attention will be allowed to be a part of democ- 
racy by its bitterest enemies. Its very excellence is that it attends 
only to what is human in each of us, and demands no special 
claim of character and position before it will devote itself to remove 
grievances and mitigate suffering. Of course this means attending 
more to the needs of the lowly than the exalted, for they are 
greater; and also they are the needs of the majority. This is a 
gain worth any price to receive. But, as a matter of fact, we do 
pay a price to secure all excellence ; and the price we pay for a 
complete recognition of every need is, that we have somewhat lost 
the subtle power of emotion, which belongs to an indirect expres- 
sion of all dumb need. 

Gray represents the eighteenth-century glance at the life of the 
poor — a glance full of sympathy, but essentially a glance from 



PATHOS 3 1 7 

afar. They are still the dumb masses. They are certainly "our 
own flesh and blood," in the sense that they feel those sorrows 
and hopes which their poet feels also, "on some fond breast the 
parting soul relies," in the palace as well as in the cottage. But 
they are hardly our own flesh and blood in Mr. Gladstone's sense. 
They are not beings, in whom we have any notion of calling into 
council as to the sanitary or educational arrangements which affect 
their welfare. From this point of view, the notion of helping 
them out of their dumbness, and endowing them with the fran- 
chise, must be allowed to strike the reader with horror. A neat 
slated roof does not more disadvantageously replace what Gray 
calls a straw -built shed, than the new view of the agricultural 
laborer replaces the old, with regard to his place in poetry. 
Wordsworth does not regard him from this point of view exactly, 
but he is not so far from it as he is from the view of the prede- 
cessor with whom we contrast him. We feel that the Bastile has 
fallen, that the ' ' Rights of Man ' ' are in the air, that America has set 
an example of successful rebellion, that the first Reform Bill is on 
its way — that democracy, in short, is a growing power. The poor 
are dumb no longer, they can occasionally be very tedious. The 
"Human Century," as Mr. Frederick Harrison has called the 
eighteenth century, was just in time for its educated men to look 
at the poor with sympathy and from afar. Earlier ages were too 
soon for the first: our own, and apparently all following ages, are 
too late for the last. The transition age supplies the elements ot 
pathos. 

It may seem to be putting a strain upon the theory of political 
life thus to connect it with literature, and that homely e very-day 
life which supplies literature with its subjects. But those who 
care least for politics are moulded by politics. That perennial life, 
in which each one of us partakes, makes up in permanence what 
it lacks in vividness : its hopes and fears become our hopes and 
fears to some extent ; and even they who turn away from all politi- 
cal interest and fry to lose themselves in the past, discover in the 
echoes to which they cannot deafen their ears something that by 
its very continuity forces them to fear it or admire it — something 
or other, to wish that this or that may come of it. However, it is 
not so much the direct influence of democratic feeling on literature 
that we would trace, as its influence on literature through the 
medium of the social life. The tendency of our age to leave 
nothing unsaid is impressed on our attention by every newspaper 



318 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

and almost every book we open, and is forced on our belief by its 
record in contemporary legislation. Why was obstruction never 
a part of the tactics of opposition until our own day ? Not because 
people have suddenly discovered, as a truth of which their fore- 
fathers were ignorant, that while you insist on discussing a measure 
it cannot pass into a law, nor because members of Parliament are 
less high-minded than they were, but simply because the whole 
tone of general taste was in former days against such a method of 
procedure, and in our day is with it. The change is a part of the 
democratic influence on the social code to which we have so often 
adverted — a change which it seems to us those equally misinterpret 
who insist on labeling it either good or bad. This particular side 
of it seems to us to be regretted ; but it is inseparably associated 
with so much that is a cause of satisfaction that we would rather 
speak of its dangers than its evils. It is intimately connected with 
what Carlyle meant by veracity. People are always mistaking 
unreserve for truthfulness, and if there were no connection between 
the two they could not be confused. Our contemporary literature 
is marked by instances of this unreserve that would have been 
inconceivable to our grandfathers : an allusion to the legend of 
Godiva, with which we remember a specimen of it being quoted 
many years ago, would have lost all its point by this time, so many 
have followed Godiva 's example. And the fashion is reflected in 
our fiction. Our greatest writer of fiction expresses all she means. 
Here is not the art that calls up a train of suggestion with half a 
word : we never feel in closing the volume that she has roused a set 
of recollections in which the original note is drowned ; her words 
linger in the memory with all the strong characteristics of their 
own individuality : but they stir no hidden springs , surprising the 
reader with the revelation of a depth of emotion within, perhaps 
forgotten, perhaps never fully known. And the words which 
convey the writer's whole meaning, though they may convey it 
perfectly and admirably, can hardly, according to our understand- 
ing of the word, convey what we mean by pathos. 

The loss of the pathetic element in literature is great. With it 
we lock the door of escape from unendurable compassion : we 
forbid ourselves ever to contemplate pain without actually shar- 
ing it. We lose the medicine for many a sick mind, the spell 
that recalls without its bitterness many a bitter memory, the medi- 
ator that teaches us compassion for many a hated foe. We lose 
that refuge from the pressure of individual sorrow, which is so 






THE SUPERNATURAL 319 

little the discovery of a civilized age, that the singer, whose words 
most recall it, is the earliest known to our race, telling us how 
the obsequies of a hero released the tears they did not cause, 
"His loss the plea, the griefs they mourned their own." Nor 
let it be thought that we speak of a merely sentimental loss : the 
thing we describe is, after all, the literary reflection of a view of 
the sorrows of life needed by all. What we can never forget we 
must at times put far from us, and contemplate through the soft- 
ening medium of thoughts that blend sorrow with hope. What 
pathos is in literature that resignation is in life ; and if a demo- 
cratic age fail to recognize the excellence of this virtue it is 
because men forget that apart from it no manly effort is possible, 
and for the majority of lives no sustained cheerfulness. They 
know it little who think it the foe of energy ; the truth is that 
energy loses half its efficacy in a nature that knows nothing of 
resignation. Do we mean to urge that the literary quality thus 
nobly related should be made a conscious effort ? All that we 
have said shows that we hold such an attempt to be self-defeating : 
at the first effort to attain pathos it takes its inexorable flight. 
But we do not think that the endeavor to avoid its foes is equally 
vain, and the most deadly among them, that love of the ridicu- 
lous which is quite equally the foe of all humor, is what, for our 
own part, we feel among the most serious dangers of a democratic 
age. While the inquest over a heart-rendering calamity is inter- 
rupted with laughter at every grotesque or absurd expression in 
the account of the disaster, while the pages of Punch are the chief 
studies of the young in their leisure hours, and while the brack- 
eted ' ' laughter ' ' in our Parliamentary reports calls the attention 
of the reader to statements in which there is not wit or pleasantry, 
or any possible source of them, we shall lose the pathetic element 
in literature, and a great many other good things also. Against 
this vulgarizing tendency of our times we would gladly see a 
strong and conscious effort, being certain that it would encourage 
not only the faculties which make literature pathetic, but also 
that it reinforces the sources of all true humor, as much the friend 
to true pathos, as it is the foe of its vulgar and libellous carica- 
ture. 

— Spectator — author not given — LittelVs Living Age, Sept. 15, 1883. 

§ 142. The Supernatural. 
Whatever be our opinion as to the grounds of religious belief, 
the fact is incontestable, that the sense of the Supernatural has been 



320 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

in all ages the most potent factor in the development of character ; 
that it has supplied the great ideals of human action ; that it has 
furnished the controlling and sustaining motives in the diversified 
movement of human life. Whether a great truth, or only a delu- 
sion of man's imagination, it has been at the roots of domestic, 
of social and of political relations ; and the proud structure of 
modern civilization is compacted of it. The history of the race, 
searched out in all its contrasted aspects of brutal force or social 
order, shows no more universal and more unmistakeable fact than 
that the human soul, whether impelled by blind superstition or 
impelled by rational instincts, has reposed on the conviction of a 
supernatural order, and recognized in things seen and temporal 
the evidences, obscure or distinct, of things unseen and eternal. 
The literature of nations speaks one voice in its testimony on this 
point; and what is literature but the expression of the deepest, 
fullest conviction of the human heart ? Let us listen to the supreme 
singers who have set to music the sovereign thought of mankind. 
Poetry, Aristotle tells us, is more instructive and weighty than 
history even, because it deals with truth in its universal forms. 
I have already quoted a passage from Goethe in his illustration 
of his purpose to seek inward peace by resolutely shutting his eyes 
to the great problems of the supra -sensible world; but Goethe, 
versed as he was in the literature of so many nations, seems 
strangely to have forgotten that literature in its noblest forms has 
always dealt with the great problems of life and destiny. It is 
the perpetual recurrence of these familiar chords that gives the 
best literature perennial freshness, and reduces all differences of 
ancient and modern to a superficial distinction. The sublime 
strains of Job find their motive in an unappeasable curiosity of 
man to pierce through the darkness that rounds off his little life, 
and to see himself in his true relation to a Universal and Eternal 
Order. Revolting from the meagre theory prevailing among the 
Hebrews of his own time, which saw in human suffering the exact 
measure and equivalent of human guilt, the soul of the righteous 
man asserts a larger solution. He seeks refuge in the thought 
that the disorder and misery, which reproach this present system, 
are parts of a plan not yet revealed. So the Greek tragedy hinges 
on the recognition of man's relation to the supernatural powers. 
And in him, who, more than any other, held the mirror up to 
nature, we find the constant recognition of the same principle. 
Also, in Shakespeare, this is all the more impressive, because of 






THE SUPERNATURAL 321 

Ms own ambiguous relation to any definite form of belief. Stand- 
ing on the water-shed of two great epochs, a new religious and a 
new political world struggling around him into being, he held 
himself strangely aloof from either. The splendor of the Eliza- 
bethan Renaissance was fading in the solemn presence of the 
impending Puritan Revolution, yet we search in vain the pages 
of the great dramatist for any hint of his revelation to the ques- 
tions of his day. For anything he has left us, we should be at 
a loss to decide whether he was a Catholic or a Protestant. The 
party questions discussed around him have left no mark on the 
.great creations of his genius. We are wholly in the dark as to 
his positive belief. ' ' To die " is to go " we know not where. ' ' See 
Measure for Measure, Act III, Scene i. 

But when he uncovers the springs of human action ; when he 
sounds the depths of human nature ; when he unravels the work- 
ings of human conscience ; when he draws man in his most hidden 
moods, in his most anguishing experiences of doubt, of terror, of 
remorse, he makes him walk along a path that derives all its 
mystery and meaning from its suggestion of the Supernatural. To 
be, or not to be, may remain an unsolved enigma, yet conscience 
cannot throw off the dread of something after death. Hamlet 
holds us, not as a son, not as a lover, but as one brought suddenly 
abreast the dark mystery of existence. What links him so strongly 
to our sympathies is the fact that he forgets his little Denmark, 
•and becomes suddenly akin to all his kind. He rises from the 
concrete to the abstract ; and not only ghastly crime alone but the 
troubled order of the w r orld, is what fills his gaze. He is irresolute, 
not from lack of will, but because his mind lies abroad. He can 
avenge his father's murder, but what will be the good of it ? There 
runs all through Shakespeare's greatest dramas this sense of man's 
kinship with the infinite and eternal. Thus, in Macbeth it is not the 
death of the victim but the remorse of the murderer that stands out ; 
not that Duncan sleeps but that Macbeth shall sleep no more. 

— The Theistic Argument as Affected by Recent Theories — By J. Lewis 
Diman, D. D., L,ate Professor of History and Political Economy in 
Brown University. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1882. 



Carlyle calls the eighteenth century ' ' the age of the prose of 
lying, of sham, the fraudulent bankrupt century, the reign of 
22 



322 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Beelzebub, the peculiar Bra of Cant. But invectives against a 
century are even more unprofitable than indictments against 
nature. We are prepared for them in theology, but they have 
gone out of serious history. Whatever else it may be, we may 
take it, for instance, that the nineteenth is the product of the 
eighteenth century, as the latter in turn was the product of the 
seventeenth; and if the prince of darkness, we may ask, had 
so lately a hundred years of rule in Europe, to what fortunate 
event do we owe our deliverance, and, indeed, the nativity of 
Thomas Carlyle, or the age which gave birth to the movements 
in which we live and to all the tasks which we are to labor yet to 
solve ? 

A century which opens with the Rape of the Lock, and closes 
with the first of Faust, is hardly a century of mere prose, espe- 
cially if we throw in Gray, Cowper, Burns, the Ancient Mariner 
and Lyrical Ballads. A century which includes twenty years of 
the life of Newton, twenty years of Wren's, sixteen of Leibnitz's^ 
and the full lives of Kant, Hume, Adam Smith, Gibbon, Priestly y 
and others like them, is not the age of mere shallowness. 

The habit of treating a century as a mechanical whole, with a 
specific character of its own, is the beaten pathway to superficiality. 
It is not to be grouped into natural periods of hundred years, as 
different from each other as is the life of the son from that of the 
father. Literature has been deluged with the affectation , intrigues „ 
savagery, and uncleanness of the eighteenth century. Other cen- 
turies had all this in at least equal degree, but the eighteenth was 
the first to display it in pungent literary form. Industry, science, 
invention, and benevolence were less tempting fields for these 
brilliant penmen. And thus an incredible share of attention is. 
given to the quarrels of poets, the vices of courts, and the grimaces 
of fops . 

What a mass of manly stuff does our English soil seem to breed 
as we call up the creations of Fielding ! What homes of sturdy 
vigor do we enter as we turn over the pages of Defoe and Swift, 
Smollett, Goldsmith or Johnson ; or, again in the songs of Bun- 
yan, in the monotonous lines of Crabbe ; or in such glimpses of 
English firesides as we catch m the young life of Miss Edgeworth ; 
in our old friend, " Sandford and Merton;" in the records of 
Scott's early years ; or in the type of Adam Smith or Bishop 
Berkeley ! What spiritual tenderness in the letters of Cowper and 
the memoirs of Wesley, Howard and Wilberforce. For all prac- 



AGNOSTIC MORALITY 323 

tical purposes the eighteenth century in English means the reigns 
of the first three Georges, a space of time which we may group 
into three periods, of unequal length, as follows : 

1. From the accession of the House of Hanover, in 17 14, down 
to the Fall of Walpole, the age of Bolingbroke and Walpole, 
Swift, Defoe, Pope, Addison, Steele, Bishop Berkeley, Bishop 
Butler, Halley, Stephenson and Bradley. 

2. From the Fall of Walpole, in 1742, to the opening of the 
French Revolution, in 1789, the age of Chatham, Frederick the 
Great, Wolfe, Clive and Washington; of Turgot, Hastings, Rod- 
ney and Anson ; of Gibbon and Robertson and Adam Smith ; of 
Kant, Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau; of Smollett, Richardson, 
Fielding and Sterne ; of Johnson, Goldsmith, Cowper and Gray ; 
of Thomson and Beattie; of Reynolds, Gainsborough, Hogarth 
and Garrick; of Cook, Watt, Arkwright, Bradley, Herschel, 
Black, Priestly, Hunter, Franklin and Cavendish; of Bach, Hay- 
den and Mozart; of Wesley, Whitefield, Howard and Raikes. 
This is the central typical period of the eighteenth century with a 
note of its own : some fifty years of energy, thought, research, 
adventure, invention, industry ; of good fellowship, a zest for life, 
and a sense of humanity. 

3. This period, extending over some twelve years of the Revo- 
lution in France, from 1789 to 1801, was a mere fragment of a 
larger movement, which cannot be limited to any country or cen- 
tury, involving the passion and the strife, the hope and the fore- 
shadowing of things that were to come. It is the age of Pitt, 
Burke, Fox and Grattan ; of Cornwallis and Nelson ; of Bentham 
and Romilly; of Wilberforce and Clarkson; of Goethe, Burns, 
Coleridge and Wordsworth ; of Telford and Stephenson ; of Flax- 
man, Bewick, Romney and Southard; of the youth of Sir Hum- 
phrey Davy, Scott, Beethoven and Turner ; and of the boyhood 
of Byron and Shelley. 

§ 143. Agnostic Morality. 

All methods of religious inquiry resolve themselves into two : 
that which seeks God in the outer world, and that which seeks 
Him in the world within. Out of the first came the old nature- 
worship, the dim and chaotic gods, alternately beautiful and 
sweet, but lustful, cruel and grotesque; the Greek stories which 
Vernon Lee recalls of Zeus and Chronos and Cybele ; the wilder 
tales of ruder races ; of Moloch and Astarte ; of Woden and Thor ; 



324 ENGLISH LITERATURE 

and in the ages before Morality, the mixed character of the gods, 
drawn out of nature, which represented her mixed aspects of good 
and evil, Ormuzd and Ahriman, Osiris and Typhon, Devas and 
Asuras. Some ages later, in the deeply speculative era of Alex- 
andrian philosophy, the character of the Author of nature and 
Creator of the world presented itself as so dark a problem that 
many schools of Gnostics — Basilidians, Marcionites, Valentini- 
ans, and so on — deemed him to be an evil or fallen god, against 
whom the supreme and good God sent Christ to recall mankind 
to a higher obedience. The loftiest point ever reached, or prob- 
ably attainable by this method of religion, was the Deism of the 
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ; and to reach it two things 
were needful not included in the problem : in the first place, that 
those who found so good a God in nature should have looked for 
Him there from the vantage-ground of Christian tradition, gained 
by the opposite method; and, secondly, that they should not have 
been yet in ignorance concerning much in nature which is now 
known, and so not have raised their induction from imperfect 
premises. Pope, the typical poet of this deism, could say as the 
result of his survey of things : 

One truth is clear — whatever is, is right. 
Tennyson, on the other hand, who knows something of the 
"struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest," when he 
has cast his glance around on nature, "red in tooth and claw with 
raven," and on all her secret deeds of wastefulness of the seed of 
joy and life — feels that he can only "fall" 

Upon the great world's altar stairs, 
Which slope through darkness up to God. 



American history may be regarded as an extension of English 
history on the other side of the ocean, and so it was with the lit- 
erature which it brought with it. It was likewise transplanted. 
L,ord Chatham once noticed the culture and ability of our stand- 
ard-bearers in a memorable speech before the English Parliament. 
The signers of the Declaration were for the most part college-bred 
men, and when they spoke or wrote they used pure English. The 
great Declaration is itself a model of English speech. The style, not 
only of Franklin, but also of Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, and 
John Marshall, was good English, to say the least, and in no sense 
derogatory to the mother tongue. The eloquence of Patrick 
Henry was that of a second Demosthenes. 



PART IV 
CELTIC AND SCOTTISH LITERATURE 



§ 144. The Kelts. 

A I ^HE Kelts of Britain and Ireland possessed an epic cycle of 
"*■ their own, which came to notice only when they were dis- 
possessed of their last strongholds by Saxons and Normans, and 
it immediately spread with astonishing rapidity all over Europe. 
The vanquished race became fashionable; themselves, their art 
and their poetry, began to be sought for as a precious and war- 
enhanced loot. The heroic tales of the Kelts were transcribed in 
Welsh and translated into Latin by order of the Norman and 
Angevin kings, glad, it would seem, to oppose the Old Briton to 
the Saxon element. The Keltic songs were carried all over France 
by Breton bards, to whose music and rhymes, with only a general 
idea of the subject, the neo-Latin-speaking Franks listened with 
that sort of stolid satisfaction with which English or Germans of 
a hundred years ago listened to Italians singing Metastasio's 
verses. But soon the songs and tales were translated ; and French 
poets imitated in their language, Northern and Southern, the 
graceful metres of the Keltic lays, and altered and arranged their 
subjects ; so that, in a very short time, France and, through it, 
Germany, were inundated with Keltic stories. This triumph of 
the vanquished race was not without reason. The Kelts, early 
civilized b}^ Rome and Christianity, had a set of stories and a set 
of heroes extremely in accordance with mediaeval ideas, and 
requiring but very little alteration. 

The considerable age of their civilization had long obliterated 
all traces of pagan and tribal feeling in their tales. Their heroes, 
like those of all other people, divinities intimately connected with 
natural phenomena, had long lost all cosmic characteristics, had 
long ceased to be gods ; and manipulated by the fancy of a race, 
whose greatness was quite a thing of the past, had become a sort 
of golden age ideals — the men of a distant period of glory which 
was adorned with every kind of perfection, till it became as unreal 
as fairyland itself. This land, in good sooth, was the country of 

325 



326 CELTIC AND SCOTTISH LITERATURE 

the Keltic tales ; and there is a sort of symbolical significance in 
the fact of its lawgiver Merlin, and its emperor Arthur, being 
both of them not dead, like Sigurd of the Scandinavians, or like 
Charlemagne and Roland of the French, but lying in enchanted 
sleep. Long inaction and the day-dreaming of idleness had refined 
and idealized the heroes of this Keltic race — a race of brilliant 
fancy and almost Southern nobility, softened for a long time by 
contact with Roman colonists and Christian priests. They were 
not the brutal combatants of an active fighting age, like the heroes 
of the Kdda and of the Carlovingian cycles ; nor had they any 
particular military work to do, belonging as they did to a people 
huddled away into inactivity. Their sole occupation was to extend 
abroad that ideal happiness which reigned in the ideal court of 
Arthur ; to go forth on the loose and see what ill-conditioned folk 
there might yet be, who required being subdued or taught manners 
in the happy kingdom, which the poor insignificant Kelts connected 
with some princeling of theirs, who centuries before may have 
momentarily repelled the pagan Saxons. 

Hence in the Keltic stories — such as they exist in the versions 
previous to the Conquest by the Norman kings, and previous also 
to any communications with other people we can see the distinct 
beginning of what was later to be called knight-errantry ; of heroes, 
creations of an inactive nation, having no special military duties, 
going forth to do what good they may at random, unforced by any 
necessity ; and following a mere aesthetic-romantic plan of perfect- 
ing themselves by deeds of valor, to become more worthy of their 
God, their king, and their lady — religion, loyality, and love, all 
three of them, mere aesthetic abstractions : this becoming the 
goal of an essentially aesthetic, unpractical system of self-improve- 
ment, such as was utterly incompatible with any real and serious 
business of life. Idle poetic fancies of an inert people, the Knights 
of the Round Table, have no mission save that of being poetically 
perfect. Such was the spirit of Keltic poetry : and, as it happened, 
this spirit satisfied the imaginate wants of mediaeval society just 
at the moment when political events diffused in other countries 
the knowledge of the Arthurian legends. 

The old Teutonic tales of Sigurd, Gudrun, and Dietrich, had 
long ceased to appeal, in their mutilated and obliterated condition, 
to a society to whom tribal feeling and pagan heroism were odious, 
and whose religion distinctly reproved revenge. These semi- 
mythological tales had been replaced by another cycle : the purely 



THK KEI/TS 327 

realistic epic, which had arisen during the struggle between the 
Christian West against the pagan North-East and the Moham- 
medan South, and which, originating in the short battle songs 
narrating the exploits of the predecessors and helpmates of Charle- 
magne, had constituted itself into large narratives, of which the 
"Song of Roland" represents the artistic culmination. These 
narratives of mere military exploits, of battles of a strong feudal 
aristocracy animated by feudal loyality, a half religious and half 
patriotic fury against invading heathenism, had perfectly satisfied 
the men of the earliest Middle Ages, of the times when Feudalism 
Was being established and the Church being re-formed ; when the 
strong military princelets of the North were embarking with their 
barons to conquer new kingdoms in England and in Italy and in 
Greece; when the whole of feudal Europe hurled itself against 
Asia in the first Crusades. 

But the condition of things soon altered : the feudal hierarchy 
was broken up by a number of semi -independent little kingdoms 
or principalities, struggling, with the assistance of industrial and 
mercantile classes, to become absolute monarchies. Princes who 
had been generals became stay-at-home diplomatists, studious of 
taxation and intrigue, surrounded no longer by armed vassals but 
by an essentially urban court, in constant communication with the 
money-making burghers. Religion, also, instead of being a matter 
of fighting with infidel invaders, turned to fantastic sectarianism 
and emotional mysticism. With the sense of futility, of disap- 
pointment, attendant on the later Crusades, came also a habit of 
roaming in strange countries, of isolated adventure in search of 
wealth or information, a love of the distant, the half-understood, 
the equivocal ; perhaps even a hankering after a mysterious com- 
promise between the religion of Europe and the religions of the 
East, as appears to have existed among the Templars and other 
Franks settled in Asia. 

There was throughout feudal society a sort of enervating lan- 
guor, a morbid longing for something new, now that the old had 
ceased to be passable, or had proved futile. After the great 
excitement of the Crusades it was impossible to be either sedately 
idle or quietly active, even as it is with all of us during the days 
of weariness and restlessness after some long journey. To such a 
society the strongly realistic Carlovingian epic had ceased to appeal ; 
the tales of the Welsh and Breton Bards, repeated by Trouvere 
and Jongleur, Troubadour and Minnesinger, therefore, came as 



328 CELTIC AND SCOTTISH LITERATURE 

a revelation. The fatigued, disappointed, morbid, imaginative 
society of the later Crusades recognized in this fairyland epic of a 
long-refined, long-idle, nay, effete race, the realization of their 
own ideal : of activity unhampered by aim or organization, of 
sentiment and emotion and action quite useless and unnecessary, 
purely subservient to imaginative gratification. These Arthurs > 
Lancelots, Tristrams, Kays, and Gawains, fantastic phantoms > 
were also far more artistically malleable than the iron Rolands > 
Olivers and Renarts of earlier days ; and that unknown kingdom 
of Britain could much more easily be made the impossible ideal, 
in longing for which squeamish and lazy minds might refuse all 
coarser reality. Moreover, those who listened to the tales of 
chivalry were different from those who had listened to the Carlo- 
vingian stories ; and, therefore, required something different. They 
were courtiers, and one-half of them were women. 

Now the Carlovingian tales, originally battle-songs, sung in 
camps and castles to mere soldiers, had at first possessed no female 
characters at all ; and when gradually they were introduced, it 
was in the coarsest barrack or tap-room style. The Keltic tales,, 
on the contrary, whether from natural tradition, or rather from 
longer familiarity with Christian culture and greater idleness of 
life, naturally made Woman and Woman's love the goal of a great 
many adventures which an effete nation could no longer ascribe 
to patriotic movements. But this was not all. The religious, 
feeling of the day was extremely inclined to mysticism, in which 
aesthetic, erotic, and all kinds of morbid and ill-defined tendencies, 
were united, which was more than anything else tinged with a 
semi- Asiatic quietism, a longing for the passive ecstacy of Nir- 
vana. This religious side of mediaeval life was also gratified by- 
the Arthurian romances. Oddly enough, there existed an old 
Welsh or Breton tale about the boy Peredur, who from a com- 
plete simpleton became the prince of chivalry, and his many- 
adventures connected with a certain mysterious blood-dripping 
lance, and a still more mysterious basin or g?'ail which possessed 
magic properties akin to those of the purse of Fortunatus, or the 
pipkin in the story of " Little-Pot, Boil ! " 

The story, whose original mythical meaning had been lost in 
the several centuries of Christianity, was very decayed and obscure ; 
and the fact of the blood on the lance being that of a murdered 
kinsman of Peredur, and of the basin containing the head of the 
same person, cut off by Gloucester witches, was evidently insuf- 



CEI/TIC POETRY 329 

ficient to account for all the mystery with which these objects 
were surrounded. The French poets of the Middle Ages, strongly 
imbued with Oriental legends brought back by the Crusaders, saw 
at a glance the meaning of the whole story : the lance was the 
lance with which Tonginus had pierced the Saviour's side ; the 
Grail was the cup which had received His blood, nay, it was the 
cup of the Last Supper. Peredur, bent upon massacring the 
Gloucester witches, to avenge his uncle, was turned into a saintly 
knight, seeking throughout a more perfect life for the Kingdom 
of the Grail ; while the Quest of the Grail became a sort of general 
mission of several knights, a sort of spiritual crusade to whose 
successful champions, Percival, Bors, and Galahad, the Middle 
Ages did not hesitate to add the arch-adulterer Lancelot. 

§ 145. Celtic Poetry. 

The ancient Celts worshipped no gods of their own, nor had 
they any temples. The machinery of their best poets, such as 
Ossian in his Epics, turns, for the most part only, on the appear- 
ance of departed spirits. These, according to the notions of 
every rude age, are represented not as purely immaterial, but as 
thin, airy forms, which can be visible or invisible at pleasure; 
their voice is feeble, their arm is weak; but they are endowed 
with knowledge more than human. In a separate state, they 
retain the same dispositions which animated them in life. They 
ride on the wind: they bend their airy bows, and pursue deer 
formed of clouds. The ghosts of departed bards continue to sing : 
the ghosts of departed heroes frequent the fields of their former 
fame. 

The Celtic ministers of religion were called Druids, who were 
of three orders — the priests, the seers and the bards. They wor- 
shipped chiefly in consecrated groves, and offered human sacri- 
fices. The bards delivered in songs their only history, the exploits 
of their heroes ; and composed those verses which contained the 
secrets of Druidical discipline, their principles of natural and 
moral philosophy, their astronomy, and the mystical rites of their 
religion. 

So strong was the attachment of the Celtic nations to their 
poetry and their bards, that amidst all their changes of govern- 
ment and manners ; and when, from the introduction of Christian- 
ity, the other two orders of Druids had become extinct, the bards 
continued still to flourish, not as a set of strolling songsters, but 
as an order of men highly respected in the State. 



330 CELTIC AND SCOTTISH LITERATURE 

After a long period of silence the bardic poetry of Wales broke 
out, just when the independence of the nation was about to be 
extinguished, into passionate and varied utterance. The princes 
who struggled successfully against the attacks of Henry II found 
gifted bards, Gwalchrnar, Blidur, Gwion, and others, to celebrate 
in fiery, patriotic strains their imperfect triumphs. A translation 
of one of Gwalchmar's odes may be found under the title of the 
Triumph of Owen, among Gray's poems. The supposed " Prophe- 
cies of Merlin " a sample of which maybe seen in the strange 
work of Geoffrey of Monmouth, fed the popular belief that Arthur 
yet lived, and would return one day to Wales as a deliverer. Both 
the Triads and Mabinogion refer in part to Arthur, but from dif- 
ferent standpoints. In the Triads such mention as there is of 
him represents him as a British king doing battle with the foes 
of the race, and full of sententious wit and wisdom. In the 
Mabinogion the indigenous Welsh view is overpowered by that of 
the Norman ^Trouveres : we have the Arthur, not of history or 
tradition, but of chivalry; and the mysterious Saint Graal proves 
as attractive to the Celtic as to the Teutonic imagination. Three 
of the romances of Chrestien de Troyes appear in a Welsh dress 
among the tales of the Mabinogion. After the loss of independence, 
under Edward I, the importance and originality of Welsh litera- 
ture appear to have progressively declined. 



After the inroads of the Anglo-Saxons many of the original in- 
habitants remained and were incorporated with the newly-arrived 
settlers ; and of the two races thus combined the Scottish Low- 
landers, in the fifteenth and part of the sixteenth centuries, were 
still inheritors of a good deal of the old Celtic temperament and 
genius, as shown in the Scottish poets of that period, preeminently 
distinguished from the English. Of Scottish poetry at this time 
the Celtic elements are thus distinctly specified and set forth by 
Rev. Stopford A. Brooke: "The first of these," he says, "is the 
love of wild nature for its own sake. There is a passionate, close, 
and poetical observation and description of natural scenery in 
Scotland from the earliest times of its poetry, such as we do not 
possess in English poetry till the time of Wordsworth. The 
second is the love of color. All early Scottish poetry differs from 
the English in the extraordinary way in which color is insisted 
on, and at times in the lavish exaggeration of it. The third is the 



CELTIC POKTRY 331 

wittier, more rollicky humor in Scottish poetry, which is distinctly 
Celtic in contrast with that humor which has its root in the sad- 
ness which belongs to the Teutonic races. Few things are really 
more different than the humor of Chaucer and the humor of Dun- 
bar, the humor of Cowper and the humor of Burns." 

To distinguish the Scotch again from the English, we must 
note their emphatic nationality. Its national elements came into 
Scotland from the circumstances under which Scotland rose into a 
separate kingdom. The English were as national as the Scotch, 
and felt the emotion of patriotism as strongly. But they had no 
need to assert it. They were not oppressed. But for nearly forty 
years the Scotch resisted for their very life the efforts of England 
to conquer them. And the war of freedom left its traces on their 
poetry from Barbour to Burns and Walter Scott, in the almost 
obtrusive way in wmich Scotland and Scottish liberty and Scottish 
heroes are thrust forward in their verse. Their passionate nation- 
ality appears in another form, in their descriptive poetry. The 
natural description of Chaucer, Shakespeare, or even Milton, is 
not distinctly English. But in Scotland it is always the scenery of 
their own land that the poets describe. Even when they are 
imitating Chaucer, they do not imitate his conventional landscape. 
They put in a Scottish landscape ; and in the work of such men as 
Gawain Douglas, the love of Scotland and the love of nature mingle 
their influences together to make him sit down, as it were, to 
paint, with his eye on every thing he paints, a series of Scotch 
landscapes. It is done without any artistic composition ; it reads 
like a catalogue, but it is work which stands quite alone at the 
time he wrote. There is nothing even resembling it in England 
for centuries after. 

The first of the Scottish poets, omitting Thomas of Erceldoune, 
is John Barbour, Archdeacon of Aberdeen. His poem of the 
Bruce represents the whole of the eager struggle for Scottish free- 
dom against the English, which closed at Bannockburn ; and the 
national spirit, which has been mentioned, springs in it full grown 
into life. But it is temperate : it does not pass into the fury against 
the English, which is so plain in writers like Blind Harry, who, 
about 1 46 1, composed a long poem in the heroic couplet of 
Chaucer on the deeds of William Wallace. Barbour was often 
in England for the sake of study, and his patriotism, though 
strong, is tolerant of England. The date of his poem is 1375-7 ; 
it never mentions Chaucer, and Barbour is the only Scottish poet 



332 CELTIC AND SCOTTISH LITERATURE 

on whom Chaucer has no influence. In the next poet we find the 
influence of Chaucer, and it is hereafter continuous till the Eliza- 
bethan time. 

James the First of Scotland was a prisoner in England for nine- 
teen years, till 1422. There he read Chaucer, and fell in love 
with Lady Jane Beaufort, a niece of Henry the Fourth. The poem 
which he wrote — The Kings Quhair — the quire or book — is done 
in imitation of Chaucer, and in Chaucer's seven-lined stanza, 
which from James's use of it is called Rime Royal. In six cantos, 
sweeter, tenderer, and purer than any verse till we come to 
Spenser, he describes the beginning of his love and its happy end. 
" I must write," he says, " so much because I have come so from 
hell to heaven. ' ' Nor did the flower of his love and hers ever fade. 
She defended him to the last ghastly scene of murder when his 
kingly life ended. There is something especially pathetic in the 
lover of Chaucer, in the first poet of sentiment in Scotland being 
slain so cruelly. He was no blind imitator of Chaucer. We are 
conscious at once of an original element in his work. The natural 
description is more varied, the color more vivid, and there is a 
modern self- reflective quality, a touch of spiritual feeling which 
does not belong to Chaucer at all. 

Robert Henry son, who died before 1508, a schoolmaster in Dun- 
ferline, was also an imitator of Chaucer, and his Testament of 
Cresseid continues Chaucer's Troilus. But he set on foot two 
new forms of poetry. He made poems out of the fables. They 
differ entirely from the short, neat form in which Gray and La 
Fontaine treated the fable. They are long stories full of pleasant 
dialogue, political allusions, and with elaborate morals attached to 
them. They have a peculiar Scottish tang, and are full of Scotch 
scenery. He also began the short pastoral on his Robin and 
Makyne. It is a natural, prettily turned dialogue, and a subtle 
Celtic wit, such as charms us in Duncan Gray, runs through it. 

But among the lesser men, whom we need not mention, the 
greatest is William Dunbar. He carries the influence of Chaucer 
on to the end of the fifteenth century and into the sixteenth. Few 
have possessed a more masculine genius, and his work was as 
varied in its range as it was original. He followed the form and 
plan of Chaucer in his two poems of The Thistle and the Rose, 
1503, and The Golden Targe, in 1508 ; the first on the marriage of 
James IV to Margaret Tudor, the second an allegory of Love, 
Beauty, Reason and the Poet. In both, though they begin with 



CKlyTIC POETRY 333 

'Chaucer's conventional May morning, the natural description 
becomes Scottish, and in both the national enthusiasm of the poet 
is strongly marked. But he soon ceased to imitate. The vigor- 
ous fun of the satires and the satirical ballads that he wrote are 
only matched by their coarseness, and a fun that descended to 
Burns. Perhaps Dunbar's genius is still higher in a wild poem 
in which he personifies the "Seven Deadly Sins," and describes 
their dance, with a mixture of horror and humor which makes the 
little thing unique. 

A man almost as remarkable as Dunbar is Gawain Douglas, 
Bishop of Dunkirk, who died in 1522, at the Court of Henry VIII. 
He is the author of the first metrical translation from the original 
of any Latin book. He translated Ovid's Art of Love, and after- 
wards, with truth and spirit, the "iEneid of Virgil," in 15 13. To 
each book of the iEneid he wrote a prologue of his own . And it 
is chiefly by these that he takes rank among the Scottish poets. 
Three of them are descriptions of the country in May, in Autumn, 
and in Winter. The scenery is altogether Scottish, and the few 
Chaucerisms that appear seem absurdly out of place in a picture 
of nature, which is as close as if it had been done by Keats in his 
early time. The color is superb, the landscape is described with 
excessive detail, but it is not composed by any art into a whole. 
It is only by bringing in the Celtic element of the love of nature 
that we can account for the vast distance between a work like this 
and contemporary work in England, such as Skelton's. Of Doug- 
las's other original work, one poem, "The Palace of Honour," in 
1 50 1, continues the influence of Chaucer. 

There was a number of other Scottish poets belonging to this 
time, who are all remembered and praised by Sir David Lindsay— 
whom we must mention because he still connects Scottish poetry 
with Chaucer. He was born in 1490, and is the last of the old 
Scottish school, and the most popular, because he is not only the 
poet, but also the Reformer. His poem, The Dreme — 1528 — 
connects him with Chaucer. It is in the manner of the old poet, 
but its scenery is Scottish, and instead of the May morning of 
Chaucer it opens on a winter's day of wind and sleet. Chaucer 
goes to sleep over Ovid or Cicero : Lyndsay falls into a dream, as 
he thinks, of the "false world's instability," waving like the sea 
waves. The difference marks not only the difference of the two 
countries, but the different natures of the men. In 1557 the Ref- 
ormation in Scotland was fairly launched, when in December the 



334 



CELTIC AND SCOTTISH LITERATURE 



Congregation signed the Bond of Association. Lyndsay had died 
three years before. He is as much the Reformer as he is the poet 
of a transition time. " Still his verse had charms," but it was 
neither sweet nor imaginative. He had genuine satire, great 
moral breadth, much preaching power in verse, coarse, broad 
humor in plenty, and more dramatic power and invention than 
the rest of his fellows, and he lived an active, bold and brave life 
in a very stormy time. 

§ 146. Ballad Literature. 

To the close of the fifteenth century belong the earliest remaining 
traces of old English ballad literature. Winkin de Worde, born 
in Lorraine, came to England with Caxton; and after Caxton's 
death, about the year T491, succeeded him in his printing office. 
One of Winkin de Worde 's earliest publications was a collection 
of Robin Hood Ballads into a continuous set called A Lytel Geste 
of Robin Hode. The tradition is that Robin was a name corrupted 
from that of Robert Pitzooth, reputed Earl of Huntingdon, who 
was born about the year 1160, in the reign of Henry II. After 
Robin had, in the wildness of youth, consumed his inheritance, he 
was outlawed for debt, lived in the woods in merry Sherwood on 
the king's game, and by his open defiance became an impersonation 
of the popular feeling against forest laws, which, under the Norman 
kings, were cruelly iniquitous. His most trusty friends were 
Little John, Scarlet, George a Green, and Muck, a miller's son. 
But he gathered also, tradition says, a stout company of a hundred 
archers, equal to aiiy four hundred that could be brought against 
them. The ballads and tales that made Robin Hood representative 
of English popular feeling, not only gave him courage and good 
humor, and connected his name with the maintenance of archery 
for national defence, but also gave him Friar Tuck for chaplain, 
and blended in him religious feeling with resistance to oppression. 
Every day ere he would dine, three masses would he hear. His 
religion took especially the form, once dear to the people, of that 
worship of the Virgin which softened the harsh temper of 
mediaeval doctrine. Maid Marian being added to his company, 
fidelity to her would express domestic feeling. 

To the end of the fifteenth century belongs the charming dia- 
logue ballad of The Nut Brown Maid. She was a baron's daughter, 
and her love had been won by a suitor who came as " a squjrre of 
lowe degree." Her faith was tried by her lover feigning himself 



BALLAD LITERATURE 335 

one who must die or fly as an outlaw, to live by his bow like Robin 
Hood. As he urged the dangers and difficulties that must part 
them, in stanzas ending with the refrain, "For I must to the 
green-wood go, alone, a banished man," the Nut Brown Maid, 
met every argument with faithful resolve to bear all and follow 
him, the stanzas with which she answered, closing steadily with 
the refrain, "For in my mind, of all mankind, I love but you 
alone." When she had borne the trial of her faith, she learned 
that ' ' the squire of low degree ' ' was neither squire nor banished 
man, but an earl's son, come to marry her and take her to West- 
moreland , which was his heritage . The ballad in proof of woman's 
constancy has attached to it besides a good moral lesson suitable 
to English taste and manner. 

' ' For syth men wolde that women sholde 

Be meke to them eche on, 
Much more ought they to God obey, 

And serve but Hirn alone. ' ' 

The ballads of The Battle of Otterburn and Chevy Chase do not 
remain to us in their first form. There is no copy of them written 
so early as the fifteenth century, to which doubtless they belong. 
The Battle of Otterburn was fought on the 19th of August, 1388, 
between Scots under James, Earl of Douglas, and English under 
the two sons of the Duke of Northumberland. It began with a 
sudden entering of England by the Earl of Douglas with 3,800 
men, who advanced, ravaging the country they passed through. 
In the warfare against English settlements in France such a raid 
was called by the French allies of Scotland a chevanchee, and by 
a common process that name was corrupted into Chevy Chase. 

Unlike the Provencal, or Romaic, or Lowland Scotch ballads, 
the English remains are too often fiat, garrulous, spiritless and 
didactic. They lack the picturesqueness, the simplicity, the 
felicitous choice of expression, the fire, the speed, of the best 
European volksliealer . Especially is this to be observed in the 
superiority of the Lowland Scottish ballads over the English. 
They are more lyrical and passionate, though expressed in the 
simplest language. The Scottish singer revives the ancient frays, 
and fights them over again in his song. This superiority of their 
verse is perhaps partly to be attributed to the Lowland Scots, as 
we have already mentioned, being partially infused with Attic 
blood; and perhaps also to their rival clanship, and rougher 
manners, often breeding in them the most deadly hostilities, 



336 CELTIC AND SCOTTISH LITERATURE 

terminating eventually in the saddest catastrophies — thus affording 
the most suitable themes for the most pathetic ballads ; and these 
again were often wonderfully improved by additions introduced 
from abroad. Tragical events in one country often occur very 
similar to those in another, especially in the earliest times of their 
history, and by the ballad singer of one country the accordant 
incidents in a foreign ballad having happened long before, were 
often transferred and appropriated to a similar one in his own. 
Thus in locality no ballad is more definitely fixed in Scotland than 
that of the Douglas Tragedy, as having fallen out at Blackhurst, 
on the wild Douglas burn, a tributary of the Yarrow ; and yet an 
exactly similar ballad exists in Denmark and in other European 
countries. 



An Announcement to the Class. 

As, on account of the many other more important studies which 
must be gone through with in our prescribed curriculum that claim 
our attention, there is scarcely time enough preserved for doing full 
justice to English literature, during the college year; and as there 
is certainly none to be spared for the study of Scottish literature, 
which, however, is intimately connected with the English, and, 
indeed, forms an essential part of it, we trust you will pardon us, 
if, during this precious morning hour which has been assigned us 
at the opening of this summer term, we invite your attention to the 
consideration of one of Scotland's earliest kinds of poetry — her 
ancient Ballad. w. m. n. 



§ 147. Old Scottish Ballads. 

But though the Scottish dialect is not well suited for the highest 
style of lyric poetry it must not hence be inferred that the Scottish 
people themselves are wanting in a taste of compositions of this 
kind, or that they are incapable of producing or appreciating what 
is sublime or magnificent in the arts. With them, indeed, as we 
have already remarked, the rational faculty predominates, but this 
is certainly not incompatible with their possessing also at the same 
time a warm and lively imagination. Of these two faculties in 
truth, if properly developed together, the former tends not to 
destroy the latter but only to restrain it within proper bounds. It 
falls in naturally, too, with the perceptions of taste and serves 



OIvD SCOTTISH BALLADS 337 

to correct them. Plato, on account of his logical turn of mind, 
was certainly no less poetical in his conceptions. 

Scotland, indeed, is not "the land of the cypress and myrtle," 
but "of brown heath and shaggy wood." On her eastern coast, 
to be sure, and on some of her islands the temperature is as mild 
and equable as that of England ; but, on the whole, as her friends 
admit, her climate is her weak side. For the greater part of the 
year it is cold, cloudy, or wet. She is afflicted with a raw and chill- 
ing atmosphere. This, in connection with her dreary moors and 
mosses, the bleak and desolate aspect of some of her mountains, 
may have, more or less, influenced the temperament of her people. 
From such causes their dispositions generally may have been 
greatly affected, just as those of some individuals are said to be 
severally by their respective natal stars. Her people are generally 
more Saturnine than Jovial or Mercurial, yet with all their 
solemnity exceedingly Martial. As their soil, too, is not the most 
productive, to make it yield them a supply sufficient for their long 
inclement winter months requires on the part of her husbandmen 
much care and labor; all of which has a tendency, we confess, to 
make them more long-headed and calculating. Still, their country 
is not wanting in beautiful scenery to inspire their fancies. With 
all her drawbacks, "in the divine beauty of created things," Scot- 
land falls behind few other countries. The banks and braes of 
her rivers, and the scenery along her lakes, have inspired the enthu- 
siasm of all tourists and amateurs, in the summer months. The 
boasted charms of Bantany Bay, in Ireland, and of the modern 
classic Lake District in England fade, it is said, in comparison 
with those of Loch Lomond, Loch Awe, Loch Lang, and "still 
St. Mary's Lake." Around her mountains, too, though not so 
mellowed, sublime, and imposing as those of Italy or Switzerland, 
yet, from their more northern site and picturesque mountains 
is thrown a solemn grandeur of its own. Besides all this, of her 
scenery the charms are enhanced, and empowered the more for 
affecting the hearts of her sons by the spirit of renowned antiquity 
which looks forth from her battle-fields, her cairns and castles and 
ruins of abbeys and monasteries, and her mountain glens, once the 
fond haunts and homes of her lords and abbots and of heroes, 
which, like the animating soul of a beautiful countenance, imparts 
to these new expression and interest. 

No wonder then that, of her people, amid such scenes, the 
patriotism is ever kept alive, and that, of her poets, the imagina- 
23 



338 CELTIC AND SCOTTISH LITERATURE 

tive faculty is inspired and incited. Of these latter, too, when 
thus possessed, the sublime flights are by no means to be measured 
merely by the compass of the Scottish dialect. This in its style is 
confined to the familiar and simple, and in its feelings to the 
tender and the humorous. In its use it is properly restricted to 
descriptions of Scottish scenery, Scottish manners and customs, 
and to the delineation of Scottish character. It cannot well be 
made to transcend these. Some of her best lyric poets then, 
though well acquainted with its idiom, as Campbell, for instance, 
who, on account of the fire and energy of his war odes, has been 
styled the Tyrtaeus of modern times, have never thought proper 
to use it, as being unsuited to their wider range of genius, being 
not confined to Scotland, and to their purer and loftier strains. 

In the same manner, too, though for Epic poetry this dialect of 
theirs is by no means suited, yet we must not conclude, on that 
account, that the Scottish people themselves have never had any 
taste or genius for this. True it is they have never produced any 
great national epic. This, however, could hardly be expected 
under their circumstances. At first, indeed, the Lowlanders of 
Scotland, like the English, being made up of a heterogeneous 
population from different nations, it took them a long while to 
become sufficiently united and national. Then, after that, for 
some centuries they were disturbed with domestic and foreign 
wars, which, though affording them fine material for an epic, did 
not long enough allow them ever sufficient ease and tranquility 
afterwards for devoting themselves to the cultivation or enjoy- 
ment of any of the highest of the fine arts. Their wars, it is true, 
served to stimulate their patriotism, and, when waged against 
England, to concentrate their interests; and their nationality in 
the end, indeed in this way deeply rooted, became confirmed and 
highly intense, as it still continues to be with many; but ere their 
literature had been fully developed their government was merged 
into that of England. With the Union, however, their patriotism 
was not soon, if ever fully, transferred, but showed itself vigor- 
ously afterwards, especially in the warm attachment of many of 
them to the unfortunate exiled princes of the royal line. This 
was well calculated to call forth their passionate Jacobitical songs ; 
but it would have required the full success of their cause, and the 
re-establishment of their sovereignty, to bring about such a happy 
state of affairs as would have inspired some representative poet 
among them to produce a great national epic. The genius per- 
haps was not wanting, but the suitable circumstances were. 



OLD SCOTTISH BALLADS 339 

We are, indeed, aware that an epic to be of the highest order 
must be more general than specific in its character. The heroes 
of such must be endowed with the choicest virtues, not merely of 
a single nation, but of all Christendom ; or, like the noblest forms 
of Grecian sculpture, they must be the realizations of the highest 
types of humanity. A poem of this description then, though 
manifesting the spirit of the country which produces it, depends 
not so much, however, for its origin and worth on her political 
condition or nationality, provided only she be sufficiently free and 
prosperous, as on the genius and culture of her people. Its hero 
need not belong to her nation. For the production of such then, 
Scotland, so far as we know, at any rate in later times, has had in 
her way no insurmountable obstacles ; yet, in this respect, it 
becomes us to confess, she has not excelled or come up to Eng- 
land. Of no such a poet can she boast as Milton : of no such an 
epic as the Paradise Lost. Still, as we have said, in special taste 
and genius she is not wanting. 

This is shown in the earliest times from her metrical romances. 
These belong, we need hardly say, to that description of poetry 
called the lower epic, being designed rather for simple narration 
or the mere setting forth, in their proper sequence, important and 
often marvelous historical events, in contradistinction from the 
higher epic, which is more taken up with the display of the hero- 
ical character. Second only to Chaucer some of her earliest poets 
surpass all others in England of this description, in their own 
uncultivated but romantic times. With all their disposition for 
excessive allegory, and their glaring affectation in Anglicizing 
Eatin words, they have more life and fervency of spirit; and 
especially do they excel in rural description. With all their 
admiration and imitation of the ancient classics, they seem not to 
have been carried away from their admiration and study also of 
the book of nature. Indeed from their fertile imagination and 
vivacity and highly figurative thoughts and language often dis- 
played in their poems, sometimes reminding us of Ossian, we feel 
almost inclined to fall in with the supposition of the poet Camp- 
bell, who asserts that the ancient Picts were perhaps not Scandi- 
navians at all, but, like the Highlanders, Celts in their origin, these 
being the people more imaginative and impulsive in their feelings, 
their Saxon element having been introduced among them wholly by 
frequent immigrations and settlements afterwards from England. 

Between the metrical romance and the old Heroic ballad, though 



340 CELTIC AND SCOTTISH LITERATURE 

both belonging to the lower epic, there is a marked difference. 
Though often having the same heroes, and treating of the same 
exploits and adventures, the one was intended originally for the 
lordly halls of courts and castles, the other for the streets or the 
humble cottages of the rural districts. The one, therefore, in its 
style, is more Norman and stately; the other more Saxon and 
simple. Though both drawn from ancient minstrelsy the Romance 
soon came to dispense with the use of the harp, being only read or 
recited; but the Ballad is still never complete unless joined with 
music of some sort, if not instrumental, at any rate vocal. It is, 
therefore, not wholly epical but also lyrical. Its flights are often 
single and always shorter, and its rhythm more simple, easy, and 
flowing than that of the romance. In Scotland, then, on this ac- 
count, it has ever found its happiest expression in her native dialect. 

If in any kind of poetry the Scotch surpass the English it is in. 
their ancient ballads. As those of Scotland belonged mostly to 
the Southern Border and those of England to the ' ' North Coun- 
trye," they were often made and sung by the minstrels of the 
people of each, whose places of abode were thus somewhat con- 
tiguous. They were separated in location, indeed, only by the 
Tweed, but in their inmost hearts often by the most violent hostile 
feelings. Of their Border warfare their ballads were often com- 
memorative of the same bloody contests, but, of course, very much 
colored from their being viewed on each side from opposite national 
standpoints. Indeed it often happened that the same ballad, 
whether heroic or not, was bandied to and forth, for several times, 
from one side of the Tweed to the other, always receiving, how- 
ever, in each country some suitable amendment, retrenchment, or 
addition, to fall in with the peculiar taste ; and in case of the heroic 
ballads, to gratify the peculiar prejudices and partialities and ani- 
mosities and assumptions of victory, of each people. ' ' The Battle 
of Otterburne," for instance, as edited by Bishop Percy, is laid 
down as being an English ballad, yet everybody can see from 
internal evidence, from its style and phraseology, though evidently 
very much altered, especially towards the close, that it was origi- 
nally Scottish. 

It is not, however, between the Heroic ballads of Scotland and 
England of Border renown that the contrast is greatest, but 
between those domestic ones belonging more to the interior of 
each country, the scenes of whose legends are not common, but 
separate and distinct. More impressed and deeply tinged are 



OLD SCOTTISH BALLADS 341 

these, not only by the national habits of the people, but by the 
distinctive natural features of each country. This by Richard 
John King, in his Selections from Early English and Scottish Bal- 
lad Poetry, is well pointed out: "The wild and lonely character 
of the Border sceneiy, the rude peel tower standing on the heather- 
clad side of some deep glen, above the rocky bed of the mountain 
stream ; the long tracts of gray moor covered with broken masses 
of rocks, and constantly veiled in the mists which float across 
them, harmonize perfectly with the wild legends of Border chiv- 
alry and warfare ; and have served also to give a distinctive char- 
acter to the Scottish and Border ballad." On the other hand, he 
remarks: "The domestic features of 'Merry England,' her rich 
tracts of highly cultivated land, stretching for miles along the 
banks of many a stream and rivulet, famous in song and story ; 
the gray towers of her abbeys and minsters, rising above the thick 
branches of oak and elm ; the hamlet sleeping in some lonely spot 
among the hills, in a little world of its own; and the cluster of 
low cottages nestling beneath the shelter of some ' old ancestral 
hall ; ' all these contributed to impress on the English ballad a 
character of repose and quiet, which we do not find in the wilder 
minstrelsy of the Border." The Scottish ballad is more spirited 
and lyrical: the English more calm and epical. The one enters 
fully into the feelings of its knights and heroes, and every fray of 
one clan with the men of another is "fought over again " in song. 
On the other hand, the English ballads are marked by a species 
of melancholy throughout, as though they treated of these sub- 
jects only as "old, unhappy, far-off things," now softened, how- 
ever, by distance and time into a new beauty, like the stern and 
terrible aspect of some frowning, remote old tower now mantled 
over with moss and ivy. 

The ridicule attempted to be thrown on ballads by Dr. Samuel 
Johnson, through his burlesque imitations of them, as being inane 
and puerile, is never applicable to the Scottish. These, though 
simple in their style and phraseology, are always graphic and true 
to nature. So tame a stanza as that descriptive of the magnani- 
mous valor shown by Witherington, even to the very last, in the 
English ballad Chevy Chase, could never have found a place in 
any Scottish ballad : 

For Witherington needs must I wayle, 

As one in doleful dumpes ; 
For when his leggs were smitten off 

He fought upon his stumpes. 



342 CELTIC AND SCOTTISH LITERATURE 

Quite Scottish and graphic is the song of the bard when he 
describes the knight and the lady, after his having taken up 
behind her on the milk-white steed, they had ridden together to 
the utmost verge of living land, where the road diverged into 
three different ways. Thus: 

O, see ye not yon narrow road, 

So thick beset with thorns and briers? 
That is the path of righteousness, 
Though after it but few enquires. 

And see ye not that braid, braid road, 

That lies across the lily leven ? 
That is the path of wickedness, 

Though some call it the road to Heaven. 

And see ye not that bonny road, 

That winds about the fernie brae ? 
That is the road to fair Blfiand, 

Where thou and I this night maun gae. 

What evinces, however, most, we would say by the way, the 
intense nationality of the people of Scotland, even beyond this 
strong propensity of theirs to render all foreign legends and the 
superhuman beings of which some of them are commemorative, 
before being admitted into their ballads, completely Scottish, is 
the patriotic zeal, with which they are disposed also to maintain 
the surpassing excellence of all creatures or productions whatever, 
which are absolutely their own. All their viands and beverages 
and music and dancing, to say nothing of other things, are supe- 
rior, in their estimation, to those of all other countries. Their do- 
mestic haggis or parritch, in savor and wholesomeness, surpass the 
richest French ragout or fricassee, or the choicest English roast- 
beef or plum-pudding; and their whiskey-punch or barley bree, 
the best champagne or cogniac. In comparison with their own 
native melodies, whether sacred or profane, all French operatic 
music or Italian trills, are tame and outlandish; and with their 
native country dances are not to be compared certainly with any 
of your Spanish fandangos or German waltzes. So they think, 
and, of course, believe. Even the Scottish warlocks and witches in 
" Alloway's Auld Haunted Kirk," though associated at the time 
with infernal spirits, cannot be drawn aside into any foreign airs 
or excitations, but, true to their native bent, give full expression 
to their feelings only through their own country dances. 

Nae cotillon brent new frae France, 

But hornpipes, jigs, strathpeys, and reels, 

But life and mettle in their heels. 



THE SCOTTISH DIALKCT 343 

§ 148. The Scottish Dialect. 

The Scottish Dialect, we suppose, in the first place acquired its 
peculiar character and genius, not in the large towns and cities 
of Scotland but in the rural districts. It was the language of the 
country people rather than of courtiers and civilians. In tracing 
the early literature of Scotland we are struck at the very first with 
the close resemblance which it bears in its language to that of 
England. Indeed it is a question hard to be solved how the early 
language of the Lowlanders of Scotland could ever have assumed 
a form so entirely English seemingly in its basis and structure, 
unless it be allowed that its ancient people, the Picts, were them- 
selves of Teutonic descent, having come over originally from Ger- 
many or Scandinavia ; and that, therefore, their original speech was 
Saxon or Danish, which two also afterwards became the first com- 
ponent parts of the English, being both dialects of that one wide- 
spoken language, the Teutonic ; for we can hardly conceive how 
the later Saxons from England by immigration merely could ever 
have taken such thorough possession of the Lowlands as to entirely 
supplant the Picts, the old inhabitants, had these been Celtic as 
some suppose, and introduce into the country their own language 
so as to make it the mother tongue, without, at any rate, having 
first completely conquered them and driven them from their pos- 
sessions, as their forefathers had the Celts from England ; but this 
is not confirmed by history or tradition. 

However it may have been brought about then, at any rate, 
of this fact we are certain, that in the earliest literature of Scot- 
land that has come down to us the Saxon, not altogether un- 
mixed with the Danish, is the prevailing element in its language ; 
and so much is it like that of the contemporary English that 
the two languages must properly be considered as constituting 
but two slightly differing dialects of the same Teutonic tongue. 
What surprises us, however, a little is that, though the Scotch 
had never been conquered, as had been the English, by the Nor- 
mans, yet in their earliest literature are almost as many Norman- 
French words to be found incorporated into its language as there 
are in the English. This, however, in Scotland may have been 
brought about from the settlement of Normans among her people 
during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and also from her 
own French connexions. "Our common language," says Ellis, 
the English Saxon scholar, "was separately formed in the two 



344 CELTIC AND SCOTTISH LITERATURE 

countries and owed its identity to its being constructed of similar 
materials by similar gradations, and by nations in the same state 
of society." 

The Scottish dialect is the language of the feelings and emo- 
tions, and is best adapted for lyrical poetry and pastorals and 
ballads. Thus it resembles very much the Doric of the ancient 
Greeks, which was restricted also to the same kinds of poetry; 
but in this the two differ from each other: the Doric, in its poetic 
use, was not confined strictly to Sicily or any other Dorian coun- 
try or settlement, but it could, to some extent, be employed also 
in Attica or Bceotia or in any other part of Greece, provided only 
that it was restricted by the poet to its proper kind of verse. The 
Scottish, on the other hand, is not transferable. It cannot prop- 
erly be used in any other country than its own. The subjects, 
scenery and heroes of its poetry must all be Scottish. So also 
must be its mythological beings. Some of these in olden times, 
to be sure, had, no doubt, been introduced from other lands, yet 
so thoroughly have they been remodelled and naturalized and 
acclimated and accommodated to the taste and feelings and habits 
and religion of the nation, that they can no longer be recognized as 
foreign, but have long since become wholly Scottish, and unlike 
those of any other land. The brownies, the bogles, the faeries, 
the water-kelpies and the wraiths of Scotland are all her own. 

Beginning at the poetry of the hearth and home and extending 
outward to that which celebrates the whole country, her dialect by 
the inspired bard is happily used in his impassioned songs, whether 
domestic, amatory, or elegiac, whether national or patriotic. Yet 
even in these, it must be said, when rising into the sublime, when 
he soars seemingly towards the infinite, the heavenly, the etherial, 
the future, far above his native land, unconsciously and gradually, 
at the same time the poet soars also above his native dialect and be- 
comes purely English. Thus in the Cotter's Saturday Night, so 
so long as the ingathering of the family, and the feelings of the 
domestic circle, and their various attitudes and employments are 
described by the poet, his language remains Scottish throughout; 
but when at the close, becoming more inspired, he breaks forth 
into that noble apostrophe to his native land, it is wholly English. 
So too in the Vision. As he sits alone in his ' ' auld clay-biggin, ' ' 
gloomily musing on his hapless lot, his language is suitably broad 
and Scottish ; but when cheered by the sudden presence of his 
tutelar genius and inspirer, the rustic muse of his native district, 



THE SCOTTISH DIALECT 345 

he is entranced by the patriotic views which she exhibits — his 
speech again becomes purely English. Thus too, the Ettrick 
Shepherd, the most imaginative of Scottish bards, and a perfect 
master of the Scottish dialect, in his poetic flights is yet often 
borne beyond this into the pure English, especially when he passes 
over seemingly into the celestial regions, as in his charming 
poem concerning Bonny Kilmeny, or when carried away even by 
some sublime visible object in outward nature, as when following 
the sky-lark in its flight : 

Bird of the wilderness, 

Blithesome and cumberless, 
Sweet be thy matin o'er moorland and lea ! 

Emblem of happiness, 

Blest is thy dwelling-place — 
O to abide in the desert with thee ! 

Wild is thy lay and loud, 
* Far in the downy cloud, 
Love gives it energy, love gave it birth ; 

Where on thy dewy wing, 

Where art thou, art journeying? 
Thy lay is in Heaven, thy love is on earth ! 

If unsuited then is this dialect for the higher strains of lyric 
poetry, much more so must it be for the epic, whose sphere is 
still loftier and wider. The scenes and subjects of this, to add to 
their charm, must properly be drawn from antiquity, and be not 
too strongly marked with any limited or modern national char- 
acteristics and features ; as this would make them too common- 
place and detract from their grandeur. Of an epic poem then the 
hero, even should he be even Scottish himself and distinguished for 
his daring exploits in his own country in defense of her freedom, 
to raise him to the proper heroic standard, must be made to par- 
take largely also of the character of the universal man; and, 
therefore, he cannot properly be described in the Scottish dialect 
as this, no matter how noble has been its origin, on account of its 
limited use, cannot now, at any rate, be regarded as being any- 
thing more than a provincialism of the English. Describing him 
in this dialect would be making of him a mere Scotchman, con- 
fining him to national peculiarities, and not allowing him to stand 
forth as a hero of universal worth. In a poem thus written the 
description and narrative throughout would fall short of the sub- 
lime. The ideal, as they say in aesthetics, would not come up to 
the form. Between these two there would be an incongruity. 



346 CELTIC AND SCOTTISH LITERATURE 

Great skill and genius, to be sure, might be displayed in its graphic 
delineations of character and scenery, and in its kind it might be 
called epical or dramatic ; but instead of heroic it would be bur- 
lesque, instead of tragical it would be comical. With the poetry 
of sentiment, indeed, it might be freighted, but not with that of 
sublimity. Such is the tale of Tarn O'Shanter. 



This particular poetical departure was due to Scotland's warm 
genius, we may suppose, for setting forth her picturesque scenery, 
and the striving events of her history, had her poets chosen so to 
do, yet drawn aside, in part it may have been from their native 
turn of mind ; but more especially, we think, was it owing to their 
too great admiration of the bards of England and of Ancient 
Rome, even beyond any attempts of these, into graphic, indeed, 
but too florid descriptions of general nature, placed in imaginary 
regions, just as applicable almost to any other romantic country 
as to their own, and into the wildest extravagance of Allegorical 
Satire, Mysteries, and Romance. 

While thus purveying for the literary taste of the upper circles, 
these Scottish poets were at the same time carried over with their 
subjects into the excessive use of the Anglicized Norman and 
Latin words even beyond the English; the illiterate common people 
in the rural districts were still holding on loyally and faithfully 
to the good old Saxon. With them, however, this remained not 
stationary. It was still slowly changing and progressing. It is 
indeed true that speech undergoes the highest culture and receives 
its richest beauty and finish among the learned, or in polished 
society; to move in which with becoming dignity and grace, and 
to maintain in this a proper position, a happy command of its 
correct expression and utterance is as essential as dress or equip- 
age. About such things, however, the common people are not 
much troubled. With their language they are well enough satis- 
fied, if it enables them to express simply their daily wants and sen- 
timents and feelings. To cultivate it for its own sake they have no 
desire or ambition. It is no matter to them how homely their words 
and phrases, provided only they express their intended meaning and 
can be understood. Among the higher classes, however, it must 
be said, that these, through over-refinement and affectation and 
pedantry, are sometimes rendered emasculate and are deprived of 
their native force. Again, however, it is also true that the speech 



THE SCOTTISH DIATKCT 347 

of the peasantry, along with their own careless dress and neglected 
manners, often becomes vulgar and uncouth. From want of care 
and cultivation it degenerates into a rude provincialism. Such, 
however, it cannot be said has been the case with the dialect of 
the Lowlanders of Scotland. It has suffered with these no cor- 
ruptions. Its changes in the course of ages have always been 
legitimate and for the better. 

To account for this anomaly in its case we must look to the 
genius of the people. For their logical and critical turn of mind 
the Scotch have always been distinguished. In this peculiar 
trait, though of the same Teutonic origin as the English, they far 
surpass these. Among British writers the keenest critics and the 
profoundest metaphysicians have been Scotchmen. The same cast 
of genius also is to be met with among the common people. In the 
choice of their language they are more circumspect, discriminat- 
ing and exact than are the English of the same grade. This is 
well exemplified in the observations of a late English writer in one 
of the British Reviews. The English and Scottish peasantry, he 
remarks, especially in the presence of gentlemen before whom 
they wish to appear to advantage, are very prone to make use of 
large words, and those mostly of Norman extraction, but with 
this difference : the Scot in nine cases out of ten employs them 
with perfect correctness, while the Englishman in almost similar 
proportions misuses them ; and to show this he gives us some 
instances as having come under his special notice, first among 
respectable English people of farmers' families. Thus, as follows : 
' ' Very wrong of her not to write ; keeping her husband in such a 
dispense." " I never tried to learn astronomy ; it is such an obtuse 
science." " Here, sir, are the parish accounts; on the one side is 
what we received, on the other what we distrusted." On the other 
hand, from persons of the same respectability in Scotland he was 
able to gather only such slight improprieties, if they can be called 
such, as these: " I hope my dog knows you," said the owner of 
a mastiff to one of a staff of gardeners alarmed at the animal's 
size and voice. "I am not afeared," he responded; "she was 
frolicsome at first and intimidated some of them." A tailor sug- 
gested to a gentleman a plan for the improvement of a cloth- 
covered door, and having executed the alteration asked for appro- 
bation, saying: "Mr. , please come and look at it; I don't 

think it all detrimental to the dignity of the door. ' ' No Scotchman 
could ever be guilty of the gross impropriety and perverseness of 



348 CELTIC AND SCOTTISH LITERATURE 

introducing and sounding, as is common with many Englishmen, 
the aspirated consonant before many words properly beginning 
with a vowel, and of suppressing it again in the commencement of 
many others to which it properly belongs. The same accuracy 
also had, no doubt, always governed the Scotch in the preserva- 
tion and improvement of their dialect. 

While thus exact, however, in the choice and employment of 
words, it is by no means to be inferred that by their distinctive 
cast of genius they were preserved in like manner from all impu- 
rities or provincial peculiarities in their pronunciation. This with 
them was often harsh and rough, being generally pervaded or 
affected, more or less in different districts, by what is called the 
Scottish burr-r, that rough, gutteral sounding of the letter r pecu- 
liar to their people. With regard to pronunciation, it is remarked 
by the same writer in the British Review, from whom we have 
just quoted, that in the Lowlands there were two extremes, the 
one slow and broad, which was that used at Angus ; and the other 
quick and sharp, which was that employed at Aberdeen. Taking 
the words ' ' boots and shoes ' ' for a shibboleth, the man of Angus 
would pronounce them "buts and shoon," while he of Aberdeen 
would call them ' ' beets and sheen. ' ' Between these two extremes, 
but partaking less of the impurities of either, was to be heard that 
rich, racy pronunciation, more especially in some of the southern 
parts of Scotland, so well suited to give full expression to the 
broad Italians, in which some of her best lyrical and pastoral poets 
have written. 

But while thus differently pronounced in different districts it is 
by no means to be supposed that the language itself was materially 
different in its mode and construction. It was no corruption or 
provincialism belonging to any section, but was as legitimately 
descended and as regularly formed from the old Saxon as was the 
English. Before the union of Scotland with England in the 
beginning of the seventeenth century, and afterwards till the middle 
of the eighteenth, every Scotchman, we are told, from the peer to 
the peasant, spoke a truly Doric language. While national preju- 
dices were still prevailing and strong, the busy, the learned, the 
gay, and the fair, out of pride, continued to speak their native 
dialect, and that too with an elegance and poignancy of which 
Scotchmen of the present day can have no just notion. " Had we 
retained a court and a parliament, ' ' says Mr. Ramsay, of Ochtertyre, 
as quoted by Dr. Currie, the biographer of Burns, "the tongues 



THE CELTIC DIALECT 349 

of the two sister-kingdoms would indeed have differed like the 
Castilian and Portuguese ; but each would have had its own classics, 
not in a single branch, but in the whole circle of literature." 

That such a comprehensive result would have followed, how- 
ever, with all due deference to the superior knowledge of Mr. 
Ramsay be it spoken, we are not prepared to assent. For certain 
departments of literature we are inclined to think that the Scottish 
dialect is by no means well suited, and that, therefore, in these, 
under any circumstances, it would never have been employed. 
For epic poetry of any sort, as well as for many kinds of prose 
composition, it is not the proper language. In their romances of 
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, all of which are of an epical 
cast, the Scottish poets, as we have already seen, were naturally 
drawn aside from the use of their own dialect, which at that time, 
no doubt, was nearly pure Saxon, though rude, into that of the 
cultivated English, with its many Normanized and latinized words, 
as it was then perhaps in some measure spoken at the English 
Court, and certainly written by many English scholars. Even 
had Scotland remained a separate kingdom and retained her spoken 
dialect, as the English would always have been the more general 
language, her philosophical and scientific writers and her historians, 
we think, as they ever have done before and since the union, 
would have no less used this language in preference to their own 
in their writings, not only as being more accurate and definite in 
its expression of subtle thought, but that their works might be 
more widely circulated. 

Their native dialect seems to have been cultivated by the Scotch, 
though indeed they were naturally of a philosophical cast of mind ; 
not so much, nevertheless, with a view to render it more forcible 
in the way of setting forth their logic and metaphysics, as to make 
it more capable of expressing, in the simplest and sincerest man- 
ner, their happiest feelings and emotions; and in the strongest 
manner also their hatreds and aversions. It was the language of 
the heart and not that of the head. The changes then wrought 
upon it in the course of time were generally those of a softening 
sort. From having some of its vowels broadened and a more 
slender sound given to others, and from having the final consonants 
lopped off from some of its words and the middle ones of others 
removed, which could be done or not at pleasure, it was thus 
gradually pruned of much of its natural roughness ; and from this 
pruning process, many of its words being shortened into liquid or 



350 CELTIC AND SCOTTISH LITERATURE 

vowel endings, it came at last to assume in this respect something 
of the softness of the Italian or Spanish, which is not common to 
a northern language. 

From the want of proper rhyming words and such of these as 
might be fresh and unhackneyed and best express the full idea, 
English poets, we are told, in their metrical compositions have 
sometimes felt themselves extremely restrained and hampered, as 
their language is not abundantly furnished with such ; and some 
of our later poets, urged, no doubt, by this want, as Tennyson 
and Longfellow, to give themselves freer scope, even in their 
lyrical pieces, have sometimes cut loose from rhyme altogether, 
and expressed themselves in verses restricted only by the easiest 
flowing rhythm and metre. Such a want, however, has never 
been felt by any Scottish poet. His rhyming shackles sit loose 
upon him. From the privilege he enjoys to some extent of modi- 
fying his words, of broadening the vowels and dipthongs of some 
of them and attenuating those of others, and of cutting off again 
from some their final consonants, as the 11 ox y, many of these are 
thus brought into social rhymes which before had no such affinity; 
and thus has he no difficulty in finding accordant terms to suit his 
need; but beneath his running pen, as it is well expressed by 

Burns, 

The words come skelpin rank and file, 
Amaist before he kens. 

Besides his abundant dialect, too, he has at his service, to impress 
from it whatever suitable words he pleases, the whole vocabulary 
of the English language. 

§ 149. The Earlier Bards of the Lowlands. 

These bards, though living in the Lowlands of Scotland, and 
calling themselves Scotchmen, were men of good English blood; 
intermixed however, in some measure, with an infusion of that 
which was pure Celtic. 

"Old Northumbria," as Rev. Stopford Brooke remarks, "had 
on its Western border a line of unconquered land which took in 
Lancashire, Cumberland, and Westmoreland in England, and, 
over the Border, most of the Western country between the Clyde 
and the Solway Firth. This unconquered country was the Welsh 
Kingdom of Strathclyde, and it was dwelt in by the Celtic race. 
The present English part of it was soon conquered, and the Celts 
were driven out. But in the part of it to the North of the Solway 



THE EARLJER BARDS OF THE LOWLANDS 351 

the Celts were not expelled. They remained and lived with the 
English, who were settled over the Old Northumbria, intermarried 
with them, and became, under Scottish kings, one mixed people. 
Literature in the Lowlands, then, would have Celtic elements in 
it: literature in England was purely Teutonic. The one sprang 
from a mixed, the other from an unmixed race ; which accounts 
for certain peculiarities in Scottish poetry which color the whole 
of it, which rule over it, and are especially Celtic. 

"The first is the love of wild nature for its own sake. There 
is a passionate, close, and poetical observation and description of 
natural scenery in Scotland from the earliest times of its poetry, 
such as were not seen in English poetry till the time of Wordsworth. 
The second *is the love of color. All early Scottish poetry differs 
from the English in the extraordinary way in which color is 
insisted on, and at times in the lavish exaggeration of it. In 
Scotland, too, it was always the scenery of their own land that its 
earliest poets described. They put in a Scottish landscape, and in 
the works of such men as Gawin Douglas, the love of Scotland and 
the love of nature mingle their influences together to make him 
sit down, as it were, to paint with his eye on everything that he 
describes a series of Scottish landscapes." 

The early poets of Scotland were, most of them, remarkable for 
their profuse use of "aureate terms" in their poetry, these being 
all terms or adjectives derived from the Latin; and their names 
and personifications of the heavenly bodies are all taken from 
Roman mythology. Gawin Douglas, indeed, was the first trans- 
lator of any Latin book into English. He translated Ovid's Art 
of Love, and afterwards, with truth and spirit, the iEneid of 
Virgil, to each of which books of the latter he prefixed a preface 
of his own. In three of these are descriptions severally of his 
country's scenery in May, Autumn and Winter, very unlike those 
of Chaucer's, whose are all conventional and confined to the month 
of May, and to his own immediate neighborhood. 

In the wane of poetry in England between the times of Chaucer 
and those of Spenser, during which period the poets of Scotland 
come in to fill up the blank, William Dunbar is perhaps the most 
considerable. His poem of the "Golden Targe," one of his best, 
though replete with "aureate terms," abounds in fine rural de- 
scriptions. "The ship, like a blossom on the spray, the sky that 
rang with the shoutings of the lark," are truly Celtic in their 
nature. "The Thistle and the Rose" has the same natural 



352 CELTIC AND SCOTTISH UTKRATURK 

charm, with the additional merit of being inspired by a genuine 
national enthusiasm. 

From the " Golden Targe." 

Bryght as the stern 1 of day begouth to shyne 
Quhen gone to bed was Vesper and L,ucyne, 

I raise and by a rosere 2 did me rest ; 
Up sprang the golden candyll matutyne, 
With clere depurit bemes crystallyne, 

Glading the mery foules in thair nest ; 

Or 3 Phebus was in purpnr cape revest, 
Up raise the lark, the hevyn's menstrale fine, 

In May, intil a morrow myrthfullest. 

Full angelike the birdis sang thair houris 
Within thair courtyns grene, into thair bouris, 

Apparallit quhite and red, wyth blomis suete ; 
Anamalit was the felde with all colouris, 
The perly droppis shuke with silvir schouris ; 

Quhile all in balme did branch and leves fiete, 4 

To part fra Phebus did Aurora grete ; 
Her cristall teris I saw hyng on the flouris, 

Quhilk he for lufe all drank up with his hete. 

For mirth of May, with skippis and with hoppis, 
The birdis sang upon the tender croppis 

With curiouse notes, as Venus' chapill clerkis ; 
The rosis yong, new spreding of thair knoppis 5 
War powderit bryht with hevinly berial 6 droppis 

Throu bemesrede, birning as ruby sperkis ; 

The skyis rang for shouting of the larkis. 

§ 150. The Poets of the Highlands. 
Besides that wild spirit of nature which belongs exclusively to 
the Highlands of Scotland, and which greatly affects her poetry, 
she is possessed of another of a still more mysterious character. 
From the fact of her inhabitants, in many parts, and especially in 
the Islands of the Hebrides, at first having been fewer and far 
between and moreover being far removed from the civil strife and 
turmoil of the people of other lands, many of them from the lone- 
liness of their situation and the solitariness of their surroundings, 
became at length to be possessed of a certain ' ' mystical lore ; ' ' 
and these men, though living far apart from each other, yet came 
at length to constitute a class by themselves, and were called 
Seers; some of whom, as Sages, through long experience and 



i. Star. 2. Rosebush. 3. Ere. 4. Weep. 5. Buds. 6. Berial, having a hue like that 
of the emerald, of a pale green color. 



THE POETS OF THE HIGHLANDS 353 

reflection, became endowed, in their advanced age, with a spirit of 
divination even deeper than that of the poets ; and besides, pos- 
sessed of a certain mysterious faculty, called the second sight, which 
enabled them not only to see and apprehend objects and doings 
in the far distance, but also to have a full and fair view of the 
most important scenes and events about to happen hereafter, which 
had not as yet shown themselves on the broad and manifest area 
of the present. 

Before the battle of Culloden had taken place, in 1745, which 
was undertaken for the maintaining of the cause of Charles Stuart 
who was then a claimant for the crown of Scotland, pertaining to 
him by the right of royal succession, in which great forthcoming 
battle Lochiel of the Highlands had pledged himself, with his 
clan to take a loyal part, Campbell, in his " Lochiel' s Warning," 
represents one of these weird old wizards as suddenly presenting 
himself before that chief; and, in the way of warning, rehearsing 
to him all the direful, disastrous, and deplorable defeats about to 
transpire in that momentous warfare when actually carried out, 
as he sees them, rapidly passing before in his entranced vision, 
as on a panorama. Thus Campbell : 

Lochiel ! Lochiel ! beware of the day 
When the Lowlands shall meet thee in battle array ! 
For a field of the dead rushes red on my sight, 
And the clans of Culloden are scattered in fight. 
They rally, they bleed, for their kingdom and crown ; 
Woe, woe to the riders that trample them down ! 
Proud Cumberland prances, insulting the slain, 
And their hoof-beaten bosoms are trod to the plain. 
But hark ! through the fast-flashing lightnings of war, 
What steed to the desert flies frantic and far ? 
'Tis thine, oh Glenullin, whose bride shall await, 
Like a love-lighted watch-fire, all night at the gate. 
A steed comes at morning ; no rider is there ; 
But the bridle is red with the sign of despair. 
Weep, Albin ! to death and captivity led ! 
Oh weep ! but thy tears cannot number the dead ; 
For a merciless sword on Culloden shall wave, 
Culloden that reeks with the blood of the brave. 

Lochiel. 

Go, preach to the coward, thou death-telling Seer ! 
Or, if gory Culloden so dreadful appear, 
Draw, dotard, around thy old wavering sight 
This mantle to cover thy phantoms of fright. 

24 



354 CELTIC AND SCOTTISH LITERATURE 

Wizard. 

Ha ! laugh' st thou, Lochiel, my vision to scorn ? 
Proud bird of the mountain, thy plume shall be torn ! 
Say, rushed the bold eagle exultingly forth 
From his home in the dark rolling clouds of the North ? 
I,o ! the death-shot of foemen outspeeding, he rode, 
Companionless, bearing destruction abroad ; 
But down let him stoop from his havoc on high ! 
Ah ! home let him speed — for the spoiler is nigh. 
Why flames the far summit ? Why shoot to the blast 
Those embers, like stars from the firmament cast ? 
'Tis the fire-shower of ruin all dreadfully driven 
From his eyrie, that beacons the blackness of Heaven. 
Ah, crested Lochiel ! the peerless in might, 
Whose banners arise on the battlements' height, 
Heaven's fire is around thee, to blast and to burn ; 
Return to thy dwelling ! all lonely return ! 
For the blackness of ashes shall mark where it stood, 
And a wild mother scream o'er her famishing brood. 

Lochiel. 
False Wizard, avaunt, I have marshalled my clan, 
Their swords are a thousand, their bosoms are one ! 
Then welcome be Cumberland's steed to the shock ! 
Let him dash his proud foam like a wave on the rock ! 
But woe to his kindred, and woe to his cause, 
When Albin her claymore indignantly draws ; 
When her bonneted chieftains, in victory crowd, 
Clanronald the dauntless, and Moray the proud, 
All painted and plumed in their tartan array 

Wizard. 
Lochiel ! Lochiel ! beware of the day ! 
For dark and despairing, my sight I may seal, 
But man cannot cover what God would reveal ; 
'Tis the sunset of life gives me mystical lore, 
And coming events cast their shadows before. 
I tell thee, Culloden's dread echoes shall ring 
With the bloodhounds that bark for thy fugitive king. 
Lo ! anointed by Heaven with the vials of wrath, 
Behold, where he flies on his desolate path ! 
Now in darkness and billows, he sweeps from my sight ; 
Rise, rise ! ye wild tempests and cover his flight ! 
'Tis finished. Their thunders are hushed on the moors ; 
Culloden is lost, and my country deplores. 
But where is the iron-bound prisoner ? Where ? 
For the red eye of battle is shut in despair. 
Say, mounts he the ocean wave, banished, forlorn, 
Like a limb from his country, cast bleeding and torn ? 



THE POETS OF THE HIGHLANDS 355 

Ah no ! for a darker departure is near ; 
Trie war-drum is muffled, and black is the bier ; 
His death-bell is tolling ; oh, Mercy, dispel 
Yon sight, that it freezes my spirit to tell ! 
Life flutters convulsed in his quivering limbs, 
And his blood-streaming nostril in agony swims. 
Accursed be the faggots that blaze at his feet, 
Where his heart shall be thrown, ere it ceases to beat, 

With the smoke of its ashes to poison the gale 

Lochiel. 
Down, soothless insulter, I trust not the tale : 
For never shall Albin a destiny meet, 
So black with dishonor, so foul with retreat. 
Though my perishing ranks should be strewed in their gore, 
Like ocean-weeds heaped on the surf-beaten shore, 
Lochiel, untainted by flight or by chains, 
While the kindling of life in his bosom remains, 
Shall victor exult, or in death be laid low, 
With his back to the field and his feet to the foe ! 
And, leaving in battle no blot on his name, 
Look proudly to Heaven from the death-bed of fame. 

Owing to the magical influence of their country's scenery, and 
their own remoteness from the world at large, the melancholy 
mood of the Highlanders of Scotland was rendered the more 
intense and its utterance deeper. Their favorite instrument for 
music was the bagpipe, and their favorite tune they best loved to 
blow on it, or hear blown on it by others, was the pibroch. This 
they best loved to hear in the far distance, leading in the van some 
resolute soldiers, in their tartan plaids and plumed bonnets, through 
the deep defiles of the mountain, in martial array, to be meeting at 
length, in full military garb, the stalwart men with their weapons, 
awaiting them in the Lowlands ; or to be hearing afar off the deep, 
melancholy notes of this tune, coming toward them on its way, 
preceding some sad funeral procession, especially when shrouded 
in mystery : 

O, heard ye yon pibroch sound sad in the gale, 
Where a band cometh slowly with weeping and wail ? 
'Tis the chief of Glenara laments tor his dear, 
And her sire and the people are called to her bier. 

On the other hand, with the Irish, the preferred instrument was 
the harp, on whose harmonious strings could be touched the 
softest or lightest airs of joy and gladness, or be struck the saddest 
and most pathetic strains of sorrow. 

Chords that vibrate sweetest pleasure 
Thrill the deepest notes of woe. 



356 CELTIC AND SCOTTISH LITERATURE 

§ 151. Thomas Campbell — 1777-1844. 

Of the poetry of the Highlands of Scotland, the poems of 
Thomas Campbell afford us the best specimens, and he is himself 
the best expositor of the life and manners of the people. 

Though of Celtic lineage, he was not himself a native of the 
Highlands but of the Lowlands of Scotland. He was born at 
Glasgow, and received his higher education at the University of 
that city; leaving which immediately after his graduation he 
removed to Argylshire, and there fulfilled for some time the office 
of a tutor in a family of some distinction : there, while wandering 
among the romantic mountains of that district, he imbibed that 
fondness and partiality for Gaelic poetry and Highland scenery, 
which, in all his after wanderings in many other lands, never left 
nor forsook him. 

The poets of the Highlands of Scotland, in their lyric poetry, 
always express their emotions otherwise than do the poets of Ire- 
land their softer sentiments : not as being felt and experienced by 
themselves, but as they sympathetically apprehend, under trying 
circumstances, they are being felt and experienced by others. 
Thus Campbell in his poem of ' ' Lord Ullin's Daughter, ' ' describes 

the scene : 

A Chieftain, to the Highlands bound, 

Cries, "Boatman, do not tarry ; 
And I'll give thee a silver pound, 
To row us o'er the ferry." 

" Now who be ye, would cross L,ochgyle, 

This dark and stormy water?" 
" O, I'm the Chief of Ulva's Isle, 

And this I,ord Ullin's daughter. — 

" And fast before her father's men 

Three days we've fled together, 
For should he find us in the glen, 

My blood would stain the heather. 

' ' His horsemen hard behind us ride ; 

Should they our steps discover, 
Then who will cheer my bonny bride, 

When they have slain her lover?" 

Out spoke the hardy Highland wight, 

''I'll go, my Chief — I'm ready ; 
It is not for your silver bright, 

But for your winsome lady ; 

" And by my word, the bonny bird 
In danger shall not tarry ; 



THOMAS MOORE 357 

So, though the waves are raging white, 
I'll row you o'er the ferry. " — 

By this the storm grew loud apace, 

The water- wraith was shrieking ; 
And in the scowl of Heaven each face 

Grew dark as they were speaking. 

But still as wilder blew the wind, 

And as the night grew drearer, 
Adown the glen rode armed men, 

Their trampling sounded nearer. — 

" O haste thee, haste," the lady cries, 

" Though tempests round us gather, 
I'll meet the raging of the skies, 

But not an angry father." 

The boat has left a stormy land, 

A stormy sea before her, 
When, oh ! too strong for human hand, 

The tempest gathered o'er her. — 

And still they rowed amid the roar 

Of waters fast prevailing : 
Lord Ullin reached that fatal shore ; 

His wrath was changed to wailing. 

For sore dismayed, through storm and shade, 

His child he did discover ; — 
One lovely arm she stretched for aid, 

And one was round her lover. 

" Come back, come back !" he cried, in grief, 

' 'Across this stormy water, 
And I'll forgive your Highland chief, 

My daughter — O my daughter ! ' ' — 

'Twas vain ; the loud waves lashed the shore, 

Return or aid preventing ; 
The waters wild went o'er his child, 

And he was left lamenting. 

Besides that wild spirit of nature which belongs to the High- 
lands of Scotland, and which greatly affects her poets, she is pos- 
sessed of other features, of a mysterious character, arising from 
the fact of her inhabitants living in many parts of the country. 

§ 152. Thomas Moore — 1779-1852. 

' As, in modern times, Robert Burns is the representative poet 
of the Rowlands of Scotland, so, in modern times is Thomas 
Moore the representative poet of the Emerald Isle. Of that por- 



358 CELTIC AND SCOTTISH LITERATURE 

tion of his poetry which is strictly national, may it be said, that 
it is the first real representation of his country in English litera- 
ture. Up to his time almost all notable Irishmen of genius, who 
used the English language, devoted themselves to English subjects 
almost exclusively. Swift, Burke, Sterne, and Goldsmith were 
of the English colony in Ireland rather than Irishmen themselves ; 
and although their education and lineage showed some of its 
characteristics in the products of their genius; and although all, 
except Sterne, exhibited some of the instincts of patriotism to their 
native land, there was no flavor of nationality in their writings, 
and they were wholly English in the literary sense of the word. 

"With Moore," says Alfred M. Williams, the author of "The 
Poets and Poetry of Ireland," "the time was propitious for the 
assertion of nationality. The spirit of the native population had 
risen, after the long period of oppression, as the intensity of pro- 
scription had worn itself out in a degree ; and the descendants of 
the English colonists, with the cessation of strife with the Celtic 
inhabitants, had begun to feel the influence of nativity, and to 
identify themselves as Irishmen. Robert Emmet was Moore's 
friend at college, and he was once himself summoned before a 
board of inquisition, headed by Chancellor Clare, when he was a 
student. The independent position of Ireland was asserted by 
Grattan and Curran, with forced eloquence ; and the era of the 
brilliant defence of the liberties of the country against the Union 
was one of the most remarkable for eloquence ever known in the 
history of Great Britain." 

In 1 8 13, when Moore, known up to that time rather as a bril- 
liant and witty society writer than as a serious poet, published the 
"Irish Melodies," they were received with extraordinary enthu- 
siasm, which was a tribute to the vindication of nationality which 
they contained, as well as to their power as poetry: to the grace- 
ful lyric melody of their versification, and brilliancy of their fancy. 
Then they were joined to the beautiful national airs of Ireland, 
which, although their strength and purity were not entirely pre- 
served in the settings of Sir John Stevenson, had never been so 
uttered to the world before in an attractive shape, and not in their 
exquisite sweetness, pathos, and originality to take captive its 
ear. These songs imparted, as had never before been done in 
English, an Irish and national feeling and patriotism, celebrated 
the beauties of Irish scenery ; and paid tribute in a distinct man- 
ner, although names were not mentioned, to patriots like Emmet, 



THOMAS MOORE 359 

who had suffered for treason in accordance with English law. 
It was in allusion to Robert Emmet's dying speech, "Let no 
man write ray epitaph * * * * * Let my tomb remain un- 
inscribed till other times, and other men shall learn to do justice 
to my memory," that Moore wrote the following lines: 

O, breathe not his name ! let it sleep in the shade 
Where cold and unhonored his relics are laid ; 
Sad, silent, and dark be the tears that we shed, 
As the night dew that falls on the grass o'er his head ! 

But the night dew that falls, though in silence it weeps, 
Shall brighten with verdure the grave where he sleeps, 
And the tear that we shed, though in secret it rolls, 
Shall long keep his memory green in our souls. 

As the ancient Welsh were sorely oppressed and sought to be 
deprived of their liberties, in their day, by the English, so also 
were the modern Irish similarly oppressed and sought to be 
deprived of theirs, in their day, by the same arrogant English; 
whence arose in each people, at the respective times of each, that 
patriotic feeling toward their native lands. 

With that melancholy mood so essentially Celtic, and with that 
ardent love for natural scenery and congenial intercourse with 
friends, especially of Gaelic type, is the poetry of Moore most 
thoroughly imbued. 

After having spent some happy days in social intercourse with 
congenial spirits, of his own kindred nature, in that sequestered 
valley, in the County of Wicklow, where the two streams, the 
Avon and the Avoca, meet and conjoin their waters, on his re- 
turning thence to his home, he thus expresses his warm admiration 
of its charms : 

There is not in the wide world a valley so sweet 

As that vale in whose bosom the bright waters meet. 

O, the last ray of feeling and life must depart, 

Ere the bloom of that valley shall fade from my heart ! 

Yet it was not that nature had shed o'er the scene 
Her purest of crystal and brightest of green — 
'Twas not the soft magic of streamlet or hill — 
O, no, it was something more exquisite still ! 

'Twas that friends, the beloved of my bosom, were near, 
Who made every dear scene of enchantment more dear, 
And who felt how the best charms of nature improve, 
When we see them reflected from looks that we love. 



360 CELTIC AND SCOTTISH LITERATURE 

Sweet vale of Avoca ! how calm could I rest 

In thy bosom of shade, with the friends I love best, 

Where the storms thai we feel in this cold world should cease, 

And our hearts, like thy waters, be mingled in peace ! 

As the bards of ancient Wales, when her people were hardly 
oppressed, by the English, recalled the names and renewed the 
strains of her former bards to incite that people to victory, so 
Moore, when lamenting the loss of his country's freedom, thus 
attunes his harp to those grand old airs still preserved, though long 
forgotten their Gaelic words, long since used by those venerable 
bards of old, who had constituted a class by themselves, equal in 
loyalty even to their kings, and who were wont to hold their stated 
conventions in Tara's lordly halls : 

The harp that once through Tara's halls 

The soul of music shed 
Now hangs as mute on Tara's walls 

As if that soul had fled. 
So sleeps the pride of former days, 

So glory's thrill is o'er, 
And hearts that once beat high for praise 

Now feel that pulse no more. 

No more to chiefs and ladies bright 

The harp of Tara swells ; 
The chord alone that breaks at night 

Its tale of ruin tells. 
Thus Freedom now so seldom wakes, 

The only throb she gives 
Is when some heart indignant breaks, 

To show that still she lives. 

The Celtic element is often expressed in English verse by the 
later bards of the Highlands of Scotland. 

Between the climate and scenery of Ireland and those of the 
Highlands and Islands of Scotland there is a marked distinction. 
Ireland is mostly invested with a softer and more Southern atmos- 
phere: her landscapes are mantled in robes of a more luxuriant 
and romantic green. Her streams partake of a gentler flow, and 
her lakes are of a calmer and more pellucid sheen ; while on the 
other hand, those of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, 
especially those of the North, are more frequently enshrouded in 
denser and darker mists, or swept over by the most violent and 
tempestuous hurricanes, and the whole face of their country 
exhibits a wilder and more uncultivated state of nature. 



CELTIC WIT AND HUMOR 361 

And, as these two countries differ from each other in their 
climate and scenery, so also do the people of each differ in their 
manners and customs: those of Ireland being more in sym- 
pathy with her milder climate, and those of the Highlands being 
more in sympathy with the wilder aspect of its more Northern 
clime. 

Originally, indeed, of the same race and lineage, the people of 
these two countries spoke the same Gaelic language, which is still 
spoken by many of the lower classes of each, but the people 
generally of each, having long since come under English rule and 
authority, in a measure, now generally all converse in English; 
and their bards write in no other language, while their hearts, 
however, are still retaining the same old Celtic mood. 

§ 153. Celtic Wit and Humor. 

Wit and humor are two essential qualities pertaining to the 
Celtic race, but, owing to the oppressed condition to which the 
people of this race in most countries have latterly been subjected, 
these two qualities have generally not been allowed to have their 
full and free expression. Those in the higher classes of society, 
in most of these countries, have been so much taken up with the 
maintaining of their lawful civil rights, and with the recovery, if 
possible, of their countries' freedom, that seldom have been the 
opportunities and leisure hours afforded them at any time for 
indulging in any social or convivial enjoyments. 

At any rate in Ireland it has been mostly among those of the 
lower classes of society, when not restrained by too severe penal 
laws or not being too heavily oppressed by their domineering 
land-holders, that these two natural qualities of their race have 
been allowed to have their full and free disportment. 

Moore was naturally subservient to the lords and ladies of the 
higher classes of society, whose refined tastes and fancies he was 
most disposed and ambitious to please. He has, indeed, set apart 
a portion of his poems by themselves and denominated them as 
being ' ' Humorous and Satirical ; ' ' but of this portion it is those 
of the satirical sort which most prevail, and very few of them, if 
any, are possessed with a genuine Celtic humor. 



The humbler poets of Ireland, besides being witty and humor- 
ous, often give utterance, in their poems, to the deepest sj-mpathy 
and pathos, on proper occasions, almost equal to such of Moore's 



362 CKI/TIC AND SCOTTISH LITERATURE 

as are in the same strain, while, of the humorous kind, by those 
of theirs, his are far surpassed. 

These of theirs are all either convivial or amatory ; and those 
of the latter sort generally consist of pleasant altercations in the 
way of raillery or jocoseness between two lovers, which generally 
tend in the end to draw them into a more intimate and congenial 
communication . 

Of this latter sort the following sportive account of the sad 
occurrence which befell pretty Kitty of Coleraine, on her way to 
the Fair, as once related to us by the innocent occasion of it, 
Barney Macleary, may serve as a suitable example : 

As beautiful Kitty one morning was tripping 

With a pitcher of milk to the Fair of Coleraine, 
When she saw me she stumbled, the pitcher down tumbled, 

And all the sweet buttermilk watered the plain. 
"O, what shall I do now, 'twas looking at you now ; 

I'm sure such a pitcher I'll ne'er see again. 
'Twas the pride of my dairy ; O Barney Macleary, 

You're sent as a plague to the girls of Coleraine." 

I sat down beside her, and gently did chide her 

That such a misfortune should give her such pain ; 
A kiss then I gave her, and, before I did leave her, 

She vowed for such pleasure she'd break it again. 
'Twas haymaking season, I can't tell the reason, 

Misfortunes will never come single, 'tis plain ; 
For very soon after poor Kitty's disaster, 

The devil a pitcher was whole in Coleraine ! 

One of the leading humorous poets in Ireland was Samuel 
Lover ; and this is reckoned to be one of his best songs : 

Young Rory O'More courted Kathleen Bawn : 

He was bold as the hawk, she soft as the dawn ; 

He wished in his heart pretty Kathleen to please, 

And he thought the best way to do that was to tease. 

"Now, Rory, be aisy," sweet Kathleen would cry, 

Reproof on her lip, but a smile in her eye ; 

"With 3'our tricks I don't know in troth what I'm about ; 

Faith, you've teased till I've put my cloak inside out ! " 

" Och, jewel," says Rory, " that same is the way 

You've trated my heart this many a day, 

And 'tis plased that I am, and why not, to be sure? 

For it's all for good luck," says bold Rory O'More. 

" Indeed, then," says Kathleen, " don't think of the like, 
For I half gave a promise to soothering Mike, 
For the ground that I walk on he loves, I'll be bound." 
"Faith," says Rory, " I'd rather love you than the ground." 



THE LOWLANDS OF SCOTLAND 363 

" Now, Rory, I'll cry if you don't let me go ; 

Sure I dhrame every night that I'm hating you so." 

" Och " says Rory, "that same I'm delighted to hear ; 

For drahmes always go by contraries, my dear. 

So, jewel, keep dhramin' that same till you die, 

And bright mornin' will give dirty night the black lie ; 

And 'tis plased that I am, and why not, to be sure? 

Since 'tis all for good luck," says bold Rory O'More. 

<; Arrah, Kathleen, my Darlint, you've tased me enough, 
Sure I've thrashed for your sake Dinny Grimes and Jim Duff, 
And I've made myself drinking your health quite a baste, 
So I think after that I may talk to the priest. ' ' 
Then Rory, the rogue, stole his arm round her neck, 
So soft and so white, without freckle or speck, 
And he looked in her eyes that were beaming with light, 
And he kissed her sweet lips. Don't you think he was right ? 
"Now, Rory, leave off, sir, you'll hug me no more ; 
That's eight times to-day you have kissed me before." 
" Then here goes another," says he, " to make sure, 
For there's luck in odd numbers," says Rory O'More. 

The poets of the Highlands of Scotland are so wrought upon by 
the wild scenery of their native country, and so carried away by 
the weird excitement of their chosen themes, that they can never 
come down in their poems to that calm and sedate state of feeling 
which is so absolutely necessary for the utterance of quiet and 
genuine humor ; wherefore is there no poetry of this sort ever to 
be met with in their poems. 

§ 154. The Lowlands of Scotland. 

This advantage was possessed by the poets of the Lowlands, 
over those of Ireland and those of the Highlands of Scotland, that 
in composing in English they were using a language which was 
entirely their own. To be sure, in the course of time, it had 
undergone many changes and modifications and appropriations 
from other languages, but in its substratum and structure it was 
still remaining Teutonic. The English people, in their amalga- 
mation with the Cimbric inhabitants of Strathclyde, who were its 
earliest occupants, had received from them many of their Cimbric 
or Celtic characteristics, as, for instance, their melancholy mood, 
in a measure, their love for wild, native scenery, and besides their 
fond addiction to the utterance of genuine Celtic wit and humor, 
but never did they lose or discard, for any other speech, their native 
old English, in which no Cimbric or Celtic word occurs. 



364 CKlyTlC AND SCOTTISH LITERATURE 

Whereas, on the other hand, the poets of Ireland, having now- 
long departed from their native Gaelic, were now constrained, to 
be understood and appreciated, to be using the adopted English 
language for their utterances, which for them at first had been 
wholly foreign, having left behind in their transfer much of their 
genuine old Celtic wit and humor, which could not be translated. 

As distinguished from the Irish poets, those of the Rowlands of 
Scotland are more given in their humorous poetry to the utterance 
of sarcasm and witty satire ; which trait of theirs, we apprehend, 
is to be accredited rather to the Teutonic or English side of their 
nature than to the Cimbric or Celtic. 

Observe, for instance, the pleasant drollery and gay good humor 
evinced towards the fair Kathleen, in his wooing of her, by Rory 
O'More, as contrasted with the lofty bearing and perfect sconner 
with which the proud Scottish lassie treats the advances of Dun- 
can Gray, her ardent and devoted lover, at Christmas times, driv- 
ing him almost to distraction and suicide : 

Duncan Gray cam' here to woo ; 

Ha, ha, the wooing o't ; 
One blythe Yule night when we were fou ; 

Ha, ha, the wooing o't ; 
Maggie coost her head fu' high ; 
Look'd asklent and unco skeigh ; 
Gart poor Duncan stand abeigh ; 

Ha, ha, the wooing o't. 

Duncan fleeched and Duncan prayed ; 

Ha, ha, the wooing o't ; 
Meg was deaf as Aisla Craig ; 

Ha, ha, the wooing o't ; 
Duncan sighed baith out and in ; 
Grat his een baith bleert and blin' ; 
Spak o' lowpin' owre a linn ; 

Ha, ha, the wooing o't. 

Time and chance are but a tide ; 

Ha, ha, the wooing o't ; 
Slighted love is sair to bide ; 

Ha, ha, the wooing o't ; 
Shall I like a fool, quoth he, 
For a haughty hizzie die ? 
She may gae to France for me ! 

Ha, ha, the wooing o't. 



THE CAMERONIANS 365 

How it comes let doctors tell, 

Ha, ha, the wooing o't ; 
Meg grew sick as he grew heal ; 

Ha, ha, the wooing o't ; 
Something in her bosom wrings, 
For relief a sigh she brings, 
And, O, her een they spak' sic things; 

Ha, ha, the wooing o't. v 

Duncan was a lad o' grace, 

Ha, ha, the wooing o't; 
Maggie's was a piteous case ; 

Ha, ha, the wooing o't ; 
Duncan cud na be her death ; 
Swellin' pity smoored his wrath ; 
Now they're crouse and canty baith; 

Ha, ha, the wooing o't. 

Such a proud arrogance as that of Maggie's, and such a forgiving 
disposition as that of Duncan Gray's could never have been 
evinced by any two of the more congenial sort of lovers indigenous 
to the soil of Ireland. 

§ 155. The Cameronians. 
During their religious persecutions the Cameronians, at their 
congregational meetings in the fields or forests, had always derived 
great consolation and comfort from their continually using in their 
singing some of the sacred Psalms of David as paraphrased by 
Rouse, which, being of the very closest rendering into metrical 
English verse that could possibly be made, were thus continuing 
to be intensely imbued with the divine spirit of the original. 
Apart from these, however, they had no sacred songs of their own ; 
but in aftertimes many sympathizing poets were wont to compose 
for them and put into their mouths, as if actually sung by them- 
selves, many pertinent and appropriate songs in full consonance 
with their present cares under their peculiarly constituted circum- 
stances. Thus, when through the " Indulgence " offered them and 
accepted, many of these Non-Conformists had been received back 
under churchly care, into kingly favor; and when the uncompro- 
mising remnant, refusing under any terms, to submit themselves 
to the sovereign rule of any earthly king or prelate whatever ; and 
thereupon were more ruthlessly persecuted and pursued with 
greater havoc and destruction, now being forbidden to convene at 
any of their beloved conventicles in the evening, under the severest 
penalty of death, the following lament, though written long after- 



366 CKLTIC AND SCOTTISH LITKRATURE 

wards by Robert Allan, is yet fully expressive, as we may well 
imagine, of what were the real regretful thoughts and feelings of 
many a despondent Cameronian at the time : 

There's nae Covenant now, lassie ! 

There's nae Covenant now ! 
The Solemn League and Covenant 

Are a' broken through. 
There's nae Renwick now, lassie, 

There's nae gude Cargill, 
Nor holy Sabbath preaching 

Upon the Martyrs' Hill. 

Scotland's a' wrang, lassie, 

Scotland's a' wrang — 
It's neither to the hill nor glen, 

Lassie, we daur gang. 
The Martyrs' Hill 's forsaken, 

In simmer's dusk sae calm. 
There's nae gathering now, lassie, 

To sing the e'ening psalm. 

In contrast with this, how striking and yet how faithfully 
characteristic, when persecution had assumed their rifest, is the 
rallying song of Claverhouse, the fiercest leader of their assailants, 
conceived, to be sure, to be sung by himself at the time, but 
actually composed long afterwards by Sir Walter Scott, with whose 
feelings he too much sympathized, of which the following is the 
first stanza : 

To the Lords of Convention 'twas Claver'se who spoke: 
" Ere the king's crown shall fall there are crowns to be broke ; 
So let each cavalier, who loves honor and me, 
Come follow the bonnet of Bonny Dundee. 

" Come fill up my cup, come fill up my can, 
Come saddle your horses and call up your men ; 
Come, open the West Port and let me gang free, 
And there's room for the bonnets o' Bonny Dundee." 

The later Cameronian poets seem generally to have had their 
predilection for their elegiac style of singing first incited in them 
during the years of their early boyhood ; but afterwards to have 
had it still further cherished and developed by their later youthfu 
training. Thus Allan Cunningham, as we are told, had listened 
eagerly to the legendary tales which his mother had delighted 
to narrate at the family hearth, and his ordinary elementary edu- 
cation had been received at a school, taught by an enthusiastic 
Cameronian. Thus had his unfolding genius been early imbued 
with a Cameronian spirit, of which he was never divested there- 



THE CAMKRONIANS 367 

after, the rich effusion of which is readily perceived as pervading 
much of his later lyric poetry. In reminding his affianced one, 
for instance, of their plighted troth, devotedly assumed, he seems 
still to be abiding under the potent influence and to be deeply 
moved, and stirred in his inmost soul with something of the sworn 
fidelity and earnest fervor, as it were, of the Solemn League and 
Covenant, as may be seen in the following verses ; 
Thou hast sworn by thy God, my Jeanie, 

By that pretty white hand o' thine, 
And by all the lowing stars in Heaven 

That thou would aye be mine ; 
And I hae sworn by my God, my Jeanie, 

And by that kind heart o' thine, 
By a' the stars sown thick owre Heaven, 
That thou wouldst aye be mine. 

Then foul fa' the hands that would loose sic bands 

And the heart that would part sic love : 
But there's nae hand can loose my band, 

But the finger o' God above. 
Though the wee, wee cot maun be my bield 

And my clai thing e'er sae mean, 
I wad lap me up rich i' the faulds o' luve, 

Heaven's armfu' o' my Jean. 

Come here to me, thou lass o' my love, 

Come here and kneel wi' me : 
The morn is fu' o' the presence o' God, 

And I canna pray without thee. 

Again, of his lamented loved one his present conception is that 
of her being now consorted in psalm-singing with the angels in 
Heaven; and his regretful thought was, when gazing on her 
incomparable beauty laid out in death's habiliments, that from 
her calm and ruddy lips, now forever closed, might no longer be 
issuing forth the holy breath of Heaven to sing the evening psalm. 

She's gane to dwell in Heaven, my lassie, 

She's gane to dwell in Heaven ; 
Ye 're owre pure, quo' the voice o' God, 

For dwalling out o' Heaven ! 

Oh, what'll she do in Heaven ? 

Oh, what'll she do in Heaven? 
She'll mix her ain thoughts wi' angels' sangs, 

And make them mair weel for Heaven. 

She was beloved by a', my lassie, 

She was beloved by a' ; 
But an angel fell in love wi' her 

And took her frae us a'. 



368 CELTIC AND SCOTTISH LITERATURE 

§156. Old Mortality . 

Of this pious preserver and repairer of the tombs of the martyrs, 
to complete the picture, we here give a description which we 
received from the Rev. Dr. Maclay, many years ago, in simple 
prose. 

' ' When a boy, "he says, ' ' I have often seen Old Mortality, who 
always made his home at my mother's house when he visited our 
part of the country, and the deeply thrilling incidents which he 
told me of martyrs, and the sufferings they endured for Christ's 
sake, left a permanent impression on my mind ; and the appear- 
ance which this singular personage then made is still vivid, as he 
approached either riding or leading the companion of his journey 
— a little pony — by a halter of hair or rope with a straw cushion 
instead of a saddle. Thus accoutered he travelled from on£ church- 
yard to another throughout Scotland, happy if he could find some 
Cameronian epitaph from which his chisel could remove the 
moss, or deepen the record which told of the virtues of his coun- 
try's martyrs, who, in 1685, had been thrown into prison, by the 
Privy Council, for the political and religious views which they 
entertained. To this pious duty he devoted his life, which was 
protracted to his eighty-sixth year. 

§157. Robert Bums — 1759-1796. 

It has been said that ' ' Lowland Scotland as a distinct nation- 
ality came in with two warriors and went out with two bards. It 
came in with William Wallace and Robert Bruce, and went out 
with Robert Burns and Walter Scott. The first two made the 
history ; the last two told the story and sang the song. ' ' But what 
in the minstrel's lay was mainly a requiem, was mainly in the 
people's poet also a prophecy. The position of Burns in the pro- 
gress of our literature may be shortly defined: he was a link 
between two eras, like Chaucer, the last of the old and the first 
of the new — the inheritor of the traditions and the music of the 
past, and in some respects, the herald of the future. 

The volumes of our lyrist owe part of their popularity to the 
fact of their being an epitome of melodies, moods, and memories 
that had belonged for centuries to the national life : the best inspi- 
rations have passed into them. But in gathering from his ances- 
tors Burns has exalted their work by asserting for them their 
simplest themes. He is the heir of Barbour, distilling the spirit 



ROBERT BURNS 369 

of the old poet's epic into a battle chant, and of Dunbar; repro- 
ducing the various humor of a half-skeptical, half-religious philo- 
sophy of life. He is the pupil of Ramsay, but he leaves his master 
to make a second protest and to lead a literary revolt. L,et it not 
be supposed that his dialect is in any degree provincial, or that it 
is a departure from English speech in the sense, in which the 
dialects of Cockneydom and of certain English writers are viola- 
tions of the language of England. It is a dialect consecrated by 
the genius of Burns, and by the usage of Scott, and now confirmed 
as a classical by its last, and, in some respects, its greatest master. 
This dialect was Burns 's natural tongue : it was one of Sir Walter's 
most effective instruments ; but the author of the ' ' Noctes Ambro- 
sianse " wields it with a copiousness, flexibility and splendor 
which never have been and probably never will be equalled. 

— Professor Ferrier. 



The Gentle Shepherd is still largely a court pastoral, in which a 
"man's a man " if born a gentleman, may be contrasted with the 
1 ' Jolly Beggars ' ' — the one is like a minuet of the ladies of Ver- 
sailles on the sward of the Swiss village near Trianon, the other 
like the march of the Naiads with Theroigne de Mericourt 
Ramsay adds to the rough tones and words of the ballads the 
refinement of the wits who, in the ' ' Easy ' ' and ' ' Johnstone ' ' clubs, 
talked over their cups of Prior and Pope, Addison and Gay. 
Burns inspires them with a fervor that thrills the most wooden of 
his race. We may clench the contrast with a representative ex- 
ample. This is from Ramsay's version of perhaps the best known 
of our songs : 

Methinks around us on each bough 

A thousand Cupids play : 
While through the grove I walk with you, 

Bach object makes me gay. 
Since your return — the sun and moon 

With brighter beams do shine, 
Streams murmur soft notes while they run, 

As they did lang syne. 

Compare the verses in Burns : 

We twa hae run about the braes 

An' pou'd the go wans fine ; 
But we've wannered mony a weary foot 

Sin' auld lang syne. 

25 



370 CELTIC AND SCOTTISH LITERATURE 

We twa liae padl'd i' the burn, 

Frae morning sun till dine ; 
But seas between us braid hae roar'd 

Sin' auld lang syne. 

Burns as a poet of the inanimate world, doubtless, derived hints 
from Thomson (i.e. the poet, not his correspondent), but in his 
power of turning its manifestations to the moods of the mind, he 
is more properly ranked as a forerunner of Wordsworth. He 
never follows the fashion of his century, except in his failures — in 
his efforts at set panegyric or fine letter- writing. His highest 
work knows nothing of "Damon" or "Mundora." He leaves 
the atmosphere of drawing-rooms for the ingle or the ale-house or 
the mountain breeze. 

— John Nicoi,, LL. D., Professor of the English Language, University of 
Glasgow. 

§158. Walter Scott— ijji-1832 . 

This is the poet's highest office — to be a prophet of new truth > 
or, at least, an unveiler of truths, forgotten or hidden from com- 
mon eyes. There is another function which poets fulfill, that of 
setting forth in beautiful form the beauty which all see, or of giv- 
ing to thoughts and sentiments, in which all share, beautiful and 
attractive expression. This last is the poet's artistic function; 
and that which some would assign to him as his only one. 

These two aspects of the poet, the prophetic and the artistic, 
co-exist in different proportions in all great poets : in one the pro- 
phetic insight predominates, in another the artistic gift. 

To begin with Homer. It was no merely artistic power, but a 
true and deep insight into human nature, which enabled him to 
be the first of his race, as far as we know, who saw clearly and 
drew with firm hand those great types of heroic character, which 
have stamped themselves indelibly on the world's imagination. 
Achilles, Ulysses, Nestor, Ajax, Hector, Andromache, Priam: 
these, while they are ideal portraits, are at the same time perma- 
nent outstanding forms of what human nature is. The Homeric 
vision of Olympus and its immortals, splendid though it be, was 
still but transient. It had no root in the deepest seats of human 
nature. For even in his own land a time came when, in the 
interest of purer morality, Plato wished to dethrone Homer's gods. 
But his delineation of heroes and heroines remains true to human 
feeling as it exists to-day. 

Again yEschylus and Sophocles were, each in his day, reveal- 



WALTER SCOTT 371 

ers of new and deeper truth to their generation. The Greek 
world, as it became self-conscious and reflective, had no doubt 
grown much in moral light since the time of Homer ; and that 
light which their age inherited, these two poets gathered up and 
uttered in the best form. But besides this they added to it some- 
thing of their own. In the religion of their poems, though the 
m)^thological and polytheistic conceptions of their country are 
still present, you can perceive the poet's own inner thought, dis- 
engaging itself from these entanglements and rising to the purer 
and higher idea of the unity of Zeus, the one all-powerful and all- 
wise ruler of Heaven and earth, till in Sophocles he stands forth 
as the "centre and source" of all truth and righteousness. 

Then, as to the life of man, we see in iEschylus and Sophocles 
the Greek mind for the first time at work upon those great moral 
problems, which at an earlier date had engaged the Hebrew mind 
in the Book of Job. The mystery of suffering, especially the suf- 
ferings of the guiltless, is ever present to them. The popular 
conception held that such innocent suffering was the mere decree 
of a dark and unmoral destiny. iEschylus was not content with 
this, but taught, that when the innocent man or woman suffers, it 
is because there has been wrong-doing somewhere. He sought to 
give a moral meaning to the suffering by tracing it back to sin, if 
not in the sufferer himself, at least in some one of his ancestors. 
The father had sinned, the son must suffer. Hubris there has 
been in some progenitor : Ate and ruin fall on his descendants. 

Sophocles looks on the same spectacle of innocent suffering, 
but carries his interpretation of it a step farther, and makes it 
more moral. Prosperity, he shows, is to the individual not always 
truly gain, but often proves itself an evil by the effects it produces 
on the character. Neither is adversity entirely an evil, for some 
times, though not always, it acts as a refining fire, purifying and 
elevating the nature of the sufferer. Its effects, at least in noble 
natures, are self-control, prudence, contentment, peace of soul. 
Philoctetes, after being ennobled by the things he had suffered, has 
his reward even here, in being made the means of destroying Troy, 
and then returning home healed and triumphant. CEdipus in his 
calm and holy death within the shrine of the Eumerides, and in 
the honor reserved to his memory, finds a recompense for his 
monstrous suffering and his noble endurance. Antigone, though 
she has no earthly reward for her self-sacrifice, yet passes hence 
with sure hope — the hope that in the life beyond she will find love 
waiting her, with all the loved ones gone before. 



372 CELTIC AND SCOTTISH LITERATURE 

It was nothing short of a new revelation when Scott turned back 
men's eyes on their own past history and national life, and showed 
them there a field of human and poetic creation that had long lain 
neglected. Since the days of Shakespeare a veil had been upon 
it, and Scott removed the veil. Quinet has spoken of the impass- 
ible gulf which the age of Louis Quatorze has placed between 
Mediaeval France and the modern time. It has parted the litera- 
ture of France, he says, into two distinct periods, between which 
no communion is possible. Bossuet, Corneille, Racine, Moliere, 
Voltaire, owe nothing to the earlier thought of France, draw 
nothing from it. Because of this separation Quinet thinks that 
all modern French literature, both prose and poetry, is more real 
and more fitted to interpret the modern spirit than if it had grown 
continuously. We may well doubt this, especially whether it has 
not been the death of French poetry — the cause why modern 
France possesses so little that seems to us poetry at all. It would 
seem as if at one time a like calamity threatened English litera- 
ture. 

In the earlier part of the last century, under the influence of 
Pope and Bolingbroke, a false cosmopolitanism seemed creeping 
over it, which might have done for our literature what the French 
wits of the Louis Quatorze age did for theirs. But from this we 
were saved by that continuity of feeling and of purpose, which 
happily governs our literary not less than our political life. All 
through the last century the ancient spirit was never wholly dead in 
England. That immense sentiment, that turning back of affection 
upon the past, was coming — no doubt it would have come — even 
if Scott had never been born. But he was the chosen vessel to 
gather up and concentrate within himself the whole force of this 
retrospective tendency ; and to pour it out in full flood upon the 
heart of European society. More profoundly than any other man 
or poet he felt the significance of the past, brooded over it, was 
haunted by it ; and in his poems and romances expressed it so 
broadly, so felicitously, with such genial human interest, that even 
in his own lifetime he won the world to feel as he did. One 
among many results of Scott's work was to turn the tide against 
the illumination, of which Voltaire, Diderot, and the whole host 
of Encyclopaedists were the high priests. 

Another result was that he changed men's whole view of history, 
and of the way in which it should be written ; recalled it from 
pale abstractions; and peopled the past no longer with mere 



WALTER SCOTT 373 

phantoms or doctrinaire notions, but with men and women in whom 
the life-blood is warm. If you wish to estimate the change he 
wrought in this way, compare the historic characters of Hume 
and Robertson with the life-like portraits of Carlyle and Macaulay. 
Though these two have said nasty things of Scott, it little became 
them to do so ; for from him alone they learnt that art, which gives 
to their descriptions of men, of scenes and events their peculiar 
charm. If we now look back on many characters of past ages, 
with an intimate acquaintance and personal affection unknown to 
our grandfathers, it was Scott who taught us this. 

These may be said to be intellectual results of Scott's ascend- 
ancy ; but there are also great social changes wrought by his influ- 
ence, which are patent to every eye. Look at modern architec- 
ture. The whole mediaeval revival, whether we admire it or not, 
must be credited to Scott. Likely enough Scott was not deeply 
versed in the secrets of Gothic Architecture and its inner proprie- 
ties — as, I believe, his own attempts at Abbots ford, as well as his 
descriptions of castles and churches, prove. But it was he who 
turned men's eyes and thoughts that way, and touched those inner 
springs of interest from which, in due time, the whole movement 
came. 

Another social result is, he not only changed the whole senti- 
ment with which Scotchmen regarded their own country, but he 
awakened in other nations an interest in it which was till his time 
unknown. When Scott was born, Scotland had not yet recovered 
from the long decadence and despondency, into which she had 
fallen after she had lost her kings and her Parliament. Through- 
out the last century a series of something like degradation lay on 
the hearts of those who still loved their country, and could not be 
content with the cold cosmopolitanism affected by the Edinburgh 
wits. Burns felt this deeply, as his poems show; and he did 
something in his way to redress it. But still the prevailing feel- 
ing entertained by Englishmen towards Scots and Scotland was 
that which is so well represented in ''The Fortunes of Nigel." 
Till the end of the last century the attitude of Dr. Johnson was 
still shared by the rest of his countrymen. If all this has entirely 
changed : if Scots are now proud of their country instead of being 
ashamed of it ; if other nations look at their land with feelings of 
romance and on the people themselves with respect, if not with in- 
terest, this we owe to Scott, more than to any other human agency. 
And not the past only, with its heroic figures, but the lowly peas- 



374 CELTIC AND SCOTTISH LITERATURE 

ant life of his own time he first revealed to the world in its worth 
and beauty. Jeanie Deans, Edie Ochiltree, Caleb Bladerstone, 
Dandie Dinmoth, these, and man3^ more, are characters which his 
eye first discerned in their quiet, commonplace obscurity, read the 
inner movements of their hearts, and gave them to the world as a 
possession for all time. And this he did by his own wonderful 
human -heartedness — so broad, so clear, so genial, so humorous — 
more than any man since Shakespeare. He had in him that touch 
of nature which makes the whole world kin ; and he so imparted 
it to his own creations that they won men's sympathies to himself, 
not less than to his country and his people. Wordsworth has well 
called Scott "the whole world's darling." If strangers and for- 
eigners now look upon Scotland and its people with other eyes 
and another heart, it is because they see them through the person- 
ality of Scott ; and through the creations with which he peopled 
the land, not through these modern democratic aspects, which 
since Scott's day have obliterated so much that he most loved in 
the character of his countrymen. ■ : — 



Walter Scott was born in the city of Edinburgh — "mine own 
romantic town" — on the 15th of August, 177 1, of respectable 
parents. Delicate health, arising chiefly from lameness, led to his 
being placed under the charge of some relatives in the country ; 
and when a mere child, yet old enough to receive impressions from 
country life and border stories, he resided with his grandfather at 
Sandy-Knowe, where, close to the farm, he could see Eildon's 
Hills, the river Tweed, Dryburgh Abbey and other poetical and 
historical objects, all of which were enshrined in the lonely con- 
templative boy's fancy and recollection. At the age of thirteen, 
he first read Bishop Percy's Reliques, under the shade of a huge 
plane-tree. This work, it is said, had as much effect in making 
him a poet as Spenser had on Cowley, but with Scott the seeds 
were long in germinating. 

Scott received a religious education, which may be seen in the 
following lines, which he wrote when he was twelve years old : 

ON THE SETTING SUN. 
Those evening clouds, that setting sun 
And beauteous tints, serve to display 

Their great Creator's praise ; 
Then let the short-lived thing called man, 
Whose life's comprised within a span, 

To Him his homage raise. 



WALTER SCOTT 375 

We often praise the evening clouds, 

The tints so gay and bold, 
But seldom think upon our God, 

Who tinged these clouds with gold. 

The youthful poet passed through the High School and Uni- 
versity of Edinburgh, and made some progress in Latin, Ethics, 
Moral Philosophy and History, but unfortunately he had an 
aversion to Greek ; and so he never entered that magic palace of 
literature in which so many of the sublimest relics of antiquity are 
enshrined. In after times, however, he managed to master the 
German, French, Italian and Spanish languages. He studied for 
the bar in his father's office, and put on his gown in his twenty- 
first year, but he never did much in the practice of law. For that 
lie had no call or mission. His real vocation was to be that of a 
man of Letters. His attachment to a Perthshire lady was un- 
fortunate, but it tended still more strongly to prevent his sinking 
into frivolity or dissipation. He was, however, fortunate in con- 
tracting an early and happy marriage with a young lady of French 
extraction, named Carpenter. He filled an office of some kind at 
Edinburgh from which he received an income, which did not 
•occupy much of his time, and he was, therefore, in a situation to 
engage in literary pursuits with little or no interruption. 

His poems lifted him at once to a high position as a Scottish poet, 
and they will never lose their odor; but his Romances, or Novels 
as they are called, elevated him to a much higher pitch. It is not 
likely that they will ever lose their interest in reading communities, 
or, so to speak, wear out. In all there were twenty-nine of them, 
seven Scottish, seven English, and the remainder of a Continental, 
mixed or private character. 

Thus, Walter's income increased very rapidly, and it would have 
become princely, if he had not removed to Abbotsford, and there 
attempted to adorn his residence in princely style. Most persons 
are acquainted with the immense debt which he then incurred, 
and with his herculean efforts by means of his pen to pay every 
cent of it, although with only partial success. 

He once said that it was his wish never to write a line or verse 
which he would wish to have expunged on his death-bed. In this 
good resolution most persons would say he was successful. No 
better example could be shown for the benefit of all persons who 
write down their thoughts in black and white than this. 



PART V 

SOME MODERN AUTHORS 



§159. Sir William Jones — 1746-1J94.. 

^HpHE Light of Asia has been long in reaching the heaven of 

-*- European song. It twinkled on the chalky cliffs of England 

in a letter from Mary Wortley Montagu, written to the poet Pope 

from Adrianople on April 1, 17 17, and contained a cop} r of verses 
addressed by Ibrahim Pasha, the reigning favorite of Achmet III, 
to the eldest daughter of that potentate, to whom he was con- 
tracted in marriage. Her ladyship took abundant pains, she 
wrote, to get a literal translation of them, which is evident enough, 
and she thought they resembled the Song of Solomon. She sent 
them to her correspondent as a curiosity rather than as a poem, 
for she appreciated their poetic qualities so slightly, that she 
immediately set to work and spoiled them by turning them into 
sing-song heroics. About this time, or possibly a little earlier, 
Burnell wrote his poem ' ' The Hermit, ' ! which is unquestionably of 
Eastern origin, and is fully worthy of its reputation as a moral 
apologue. 

It was followed by four musical but absurd productions, the 
work of a true poet, in whose exquisite little volume they may 
be read to-day as "Oriental Eclogues." Of greater intellectual 
value than these was the famous ' ' Vision of Mirza ' ' in the 
"Spectator," but of doubtful value was Johnson's lumbering 
story of "Rasselas." Of no value at all were the many delinea- 
tions of Asiatic personages in the early poetic drama of England — ■ 
its Tamburlanes, Bajazets, Aureng-Zebes — monstrosities that 
would be laughable, it they were not horrible. A host of other 
Orientalities — the spawn of these, and of the Anglicized version 
of Galland's French paraphrase of "The Thousand and One 
Xights," "Persian Tales," "Chinese Tales," "Tales of the 
Genii ' ' and what not — confounded the English mind with their 
vast and varied misinformation concerning the literature of the 
East. 

It might have been enlightened, however, toward the close of the 

376 



SIR WILLIAM JONES 377 

last century by Sir William Jones, who was one of the first, if not 
the first, Englishman to devote himself seriously to Oriental studies, 
which were then in their infancy among Europeans, and he achieved 
what was then thought to be eminence therein. His scholarship 
was more remarkable than his talents, which were not distin- 
guished for force or originality, and were rather of a judicial than 
poetic order. He wrote two volumes of elaborate trifles in rhyme, 
among which were a number of translations, paraphrases, and 
imitations in Latin and English, of Arabic, Persian, Chinese, and 
Turkish poems, besides a series of hymns in honor of several 
Hindoo deities. It is possible to read these languid exercises in 
verse, but it requires a large fund of patience to do so, and a 
determination to find something characteristic in them. Only 
one of Sir William's Eastern poems has come down to us through 
the poetic anthologies — a loose paraphrase, for it is in sense a 
translation of Gazel of Hafiz, beginning with il Eglier an Turki 
Shirazi" which is chiefly remembered on account of its single 

quotable line : 

Like Orient pearls at random strung. 

If Sir William had been a poet, the Light of Asia might have 
touched us sooner than it did, and its white radiance need not 
have been obscured, as it was by the lurid gloom of Byron and the 
twinkling illuminations of Moore. But it was not lost, for gleams 
of it struggled out now and then in the poems of Leigh Hunt, 
whose ' ' Abou Ben- Adhem ' ' will live as long as the language ; 
in those of Trench, whose "Poems from Eastern Sources" are 
the best things that he has written ; and in Matthew Arnold's 
"Sohrab and Rustem," a noble rendering of the most pathetic 
episode of the Shah Nameh of Ferdousi, and in his "Sick King 
of Bokhara ' ' — a soul-troubled relation of the melancholy Prince 
of Denmark. Nor was it merely handed down to us by the poets, 
like the torches in the old Greek game, for the more the languages 
of the East were studied the clearer it became. It was a guiding 
star to scholars all over Europe, who dedicated their lives to the 
study of the Sanskrit, the Persian, and Chinese; it was afresh 
source of inspiration to Goethe, and Ruckert and Bodenstedt ; and 
it was a stumbling-block to Christian missionaries, who were obliged 
to translate the Scriptures of the East before they could hope to sup- 
plant them. We owe these good gentlemen more, no doubt, than 
they intended we should ; for, in their endeavor to show the supe- 
riority of our religion over the religions of the East, they were 



378 SOME MODERN AUTHORS 

compelled to state just what those religions are; and, in so doing, 
to place in our hands a standard of comparison which we did not 
before possess, and which perhaps is not so favorable to their own 
dogmatism as they suppose. But, however, this may be, and 
through whatever means it has been gained, an authentic and noble 
knowledge of the cradle of the race has become a part of our intel- 
lectual inheritance, and has prepared us to welcome its manifesta- 
tion in ' ' The Light of Asia. ' ' 

The mere word ' ' Asia ' ' summons a thousand remembrances of 
the primitive race as they are recorded in tradition ; the goings 
forth of men with their flocks and herds ; the encampments of tents 
followed by villages of huts, which in turn are followed by walled 
towns and cities ; kingdoms of which we only know the names 
of their rulers, and that their peoples were of less account in their 
eyes than the wild beasts they hunted ; the building up of great 
empires, structures of tyrannous power cemented with blood, and 
the downfall. — Edwin Arnold — The Light of Asia. 

§ 160. Cowper — 1731-1800. 

' ' Style, ' ' says Mr. Matthew Arnold, ' ' in my sense of the word, 
is a peculiar recasting and heightening, under a certain spiritual 
excitement, a certain pressure of emotion, of what a man has to 
say, in such a manner as to add dignity and distinction to it." 

He dwells so fondly on Milton's most elaborate and artistically 
condensed lines that one would almost be led to suppose, what 
cannot be, that he denies the highest praise to the most perfect 
style of all, which bears with it "the charm of an uncommuni- 
cable simplicity." 

Not once only or twice, in the history of literature, has this 
malady of conventionalism smitten it to the core. The great 
Roman poet, perhaps the greatest artist of language the world has 
seen, created for himself an elaborate rhythm, and a high -wrought 
language, tesselated with fragments from all former poets, yet 
worked into an exquisite and harmonious whole which was simply 
inimitable. But in the hands of Silvius Italicus, Statius and others, 
the Virgilian hexameter gives one the sense of a faded imitation 
from which the life is gone. Milton, perhaps the next greatest 
artist of language, moulded for himself a ' ' grand style ' ' of his own 
with a similar result. When his blank verse, with its involved and 
inverted structure, became the heirloom of English poets, it spoiled 
all our blank verse for nearly two centuries. No meaner hand than 



cowper 379 

that of the great master himself could wield his gigantic instrument. 
When its tones were recalled in the cumbrous descriptions of 
Thomson and in the sonorous platitudes of Young, the result was 
wearisome. Another tyrant who for several generations dominated 
English verse was Pope. What Milton did for blank verse, Pope 
did for the heroic couplet — left it as a tradition from which no 
poet of the last century could entirely escape. Goldsmith, indeed, 
in his "Deserted Village," and Gray in his "Elegy," returned 
somewhat nearer to the language of natural feeling. But it was 
not till Burns and Cowper appeared that poetry was able to throw 
off the fetters of diction in which Milton and Pope had bound it. 
Burns and Cowper were the precursors of a revolt against the 
tyrant tradition, rather than the leaders of it. The return they 
began towards a freer, more natural diction, came from an uncon- 
scious instinct for nature rather than from any formal theory or 
any announced principle on which they composed. In Burns it 
may almost be said to have been by a happy accident. He had 
been reared where literary fashions were unknown. His strong 
intellect naturally loved plain reality, and his whole life was a 
rebellion against conventions and proprieties, good and bad alike. 
When his inspiration came, the language he found ready to his 
hand was not the worn-out diction of Pope or Shenstone, but the 
racy vernacular of his native country. It was well that he knew 
so little of literary modes when he began his poetry. For late 
in life he confessed that had he known more of the English poets 
of his time, he would not have ventured to use the homely ' ' west- 
lin' jingle " which he has made classical. When he did attempt 
to write pure English verse, the result was third-rate conventional 
stuff. As for Cowper, it was only after a time, and then but in 
part, that he emancipated himself from the old trammels. In his 
first volume, published in 1782, containing " Table Talk," " The 
Progress of Error," and other pieces, we see his fine wit and deli- 
cate feeling, laboring to express themselves through the forced 
antitheses and monotonous rhythm of Pope. The blank verse of 
"The Task " is freer, more unembarrassed, and yet it contains a 
strange intermingling of several distinct manners. Almost in the 
same page you find the stately Miltonic style, with its tortuous 
involutions employed for the homeliest, or even trivial matters, 
within a few lines, and such passages of playful humor or sweet 
pensiveness as his address to his "pet hare," or his allusion to 
his own spiritual history in the pathetic lines beginning 



380 SOMK MODKRN AUTHORS 

I was a stricken deer that left the flock 
Long since 

It is in such passages as these last that Cowper has rendered his 
best service to English poetry, by showing with what felicitous 
grace the blank verse lends itself to far other styles than the stately 
Miltonic movement. And yet towards the end of his life, in his 
translation of Homer, he returns to the Miltonic manner, and by 
doing so spoiled his work. 

Burns and Cowper then were, as I have said, the forerunners of 
the revolt, not the conscious leaders of it. The end of the old 
poetic regime came with the great outburst of new and original 
poetry, which marked the last decade of the former century and 
the first two decades of the present. It required some great catas- 
trophe to remove the accumulations of used-up verbiage, which 
had so long choked the sources of inspiration, and to cut for the 
fresh springs of poetic feeling new and appropriate laurels of lan- 
guage. It was as though some great frozen lake, which had 
already been traversed here and there with strange rents, as in 
Burns 's and Cowper 's efforts, were suddenly in one night's thaw 
broken up, and the old ice of style which had so long fettered 
men's minds had been swept away forever. 

In the great outburst of song with which England ushered in 
this century individuality had full swing. The exuberance, not to 
say the extravagance, of young genius was unchecked. His own 
impulse was to each poet his law. Each uttered himself in his 
own way, in a style of his own, or without style, as native pas- 
sion prompted. In their work there was much that was irregular, 
much that was imperfect, but it was young imagination revelling 
in a new-found strength and freedom. Criticism that had insight, 
that could be helpful, there was none extant. For Jeffrey with 
his Edinburgh Review did his little best to extinguish each rising 
genius as it appeared. Among the host of British poets then born 
into the world, six at least may be named of first-rate power. Each 
of these shaped for himself a style which was his own, individual, 
manly, and with whatever faults, effective. These six were Words- 
worth, Coleridge, Swift, Byron, Shelley, Keats. Each of these 
had a style of his own and we know it. None of them, it is true, 
always maintained their own highest level of form, rhythm, and 
diction, as Milton did, or as Gray may be said to have done. 
They were all of them hasty, and even slovenly in style; but 
each of them, when he was at his best, when he was grasping at 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 381 

his greatest strength, had substance, had something of his own 
to say, which he did say in his own manner. 

— John Campbell Shairp. 

§ 161. Samuel Taylor Coleridge — 1772-1834. 

If, for a starting point, we ask ourselves, what elements make 
up the quality that has given Coleridge's poems their hold, two 
naturally present themselves: Coleridge's sensibility to suffer- 
ing and sorrow; and that faculty of complete surrender to a 
vision upborne in melody which — whether we call it poetic rage, 
divination, possession, or by any other name, inadequate as all 
must be — exercises a kind of odyllic sway, mesmerizing not only 
the listener but the composer himself. The simple instinct for 
truth, which is every poet's, does not make the whole of this 
faculty I speak of. There must be with such instinct a gift of 
supreme musical intuition, so that the minstrel shall warp himself 
oblivious in the eddies of his song, and become lost in the magic 
of his own incantation. The union of this gift and the instinct 
in a high degree does not come to many men. The Hebrew 
prophets are exponents of it ; Pindar grandly exercised it. We find 
it in Shakespeare, Hugo, Keats, Shelley and Swinburne. Schil- 
ler was swayed, and sways by it sometimes ; but not Goethe. Two 
of our American poets disclose it: Edgar Poe, and Whitman in a 
work like his poem on the death of Lincoln. Readers will at once 
recognize the mesmeric presence in the ' ' Christabel ' ' and ' ' The 
Ancient Mariner; " but it is nowhere more intense and striking 
than in the pulsing verse, the abrupt transitions and rhapsodic 
images of Kubla Khan. ' ' The Ode to the Departing Year ' ' — 1796 
— brings with it again something of a mystic passion that we ex- 
pect from the full-statured Coleridge ; and we find a new inspiration 
in the "France," with its grand invocation and its epode, which 
imparts so noble a joy to liberty, when he says: 

While on the sea-cliff's verge I stood 

And shot my being through earth, sea and air, 

Possessing all things with intensest love, 
O Liberty ! my spirit felt thee there ! 

Not only individual love, but this all-embracing passion as well, 
had come to mellow his song. His soul had suddenly and swiftly 
awaked to larger sympathies. From the faint and lachrymose 
musings and regrets of adolescence ; from pinings over Lee Boo 



382 SOME MODERN AUTHORS 

and others, and gratitude to Bowles for ' ' those soft strains ' ' which 
soothes him, yet "the big tear renewed;" from all this he was 
caught up and carried away 03^ the culmination of a republican and 
human fervor roused to indignation against his own selfish England; 
and to tortured ecstasy over the mingled idealism and atrocity of 
France. His democratic, possibly agrarian, sentiments had appeared 
in a line here and there before, but had not been lifted into sustained 
poetic expression until the writing of these odes. His style, too, 
in the ' ' Destiny of Nations ' ' and ' ' Religious Musings ' ' was 
Cowperized Milton; the ink, we may say, being dried to some 
extent with Southey's sand. He now attained to a voice of his 
own, and one of singular force, when compared with those who 
had given the pitch till then, such as Pope, Addison, Goldsmith, 
Rogers. A year before his marriage he had said, addressing the 
' ' Contemplative Spirits ' ' that hover about the throne of God : 

I haply journeying my immortal cause 

Shall sometimes join your mystic choir. Till then 

I discipline my young and novice heart 

In ministerings of heart-stirring songs ; 

but the heart was not visibly stirred until the date of the ' ' Depart- 
ing Year. ' ' He himself tells us, that in those lines to a young lady, 
before referred to, that it was when slumbering Freedom came and 
' ' scattered battles from her eyes ' ' that the patriot fire was kindled 
in him ; and his mind forsook those feebler woes that had hitherto 
absorbed it. His Confession to the young lady belongs to the 
year 1792; and the Ode on France bears the mark of 1797: by 
that time the enthusiasm for freedom had manifested itself in an 
enduring form. 

I am particular about these dates, because we have now to 
observe a very important fact in the chronology of the poet's mind. 
When Coleridge was twenty-two, that is in 1794, after the break, in 
his academic course, caused by his enlisting as a light dragoon, he 
left Cambridge ; made a pedestrian tour in Wales, and then joined 
Southey at Bristol, where he met Miss Fricker, his future wife, 
and the sister of the lady whom Southey afterwards wedded. In 
October of the next year he was married. Then two years were 
passed in a whirlpool of changing plans, postponement of work, 
removal from place to place, the unsuccessful publication of the 
"Watchman." His first book of poems was printed during this 
inauspicious beginning of a responsible career. Finally, he returned 
to Stowev and took a house there. W^ordsworth and his sister 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 383 

were neighbors at Alfoxden, and the happiest epoch in Coleridge's 
life followed, crossed though it was by pangs of suffering, 
haunted by the very palpable ghost of poverty. It was here also 
that he took opium, to relieve a terrible neuralgic or rheumatic 
pain. This was on November 5, 1796. In the last days of the 
next month he wrote the Ode to the Departing Year. In the fol- 
lowing }^ear, note again, he wrote The Ancient Mariner, the Love, 
the first part of Christabel, the Dark Ladie, the Kubla Khan, and 
his tragedy of Remorse. 

Here is a coincidence of some import. In 1796 he had begun 
using opium, a habit which clung to him for the best part of his 
long remaining life ; and in 1797 he composed those several poems, 
which have given him his distinctive fame- — the poems that stand 
preeminent for that melodious exaltation, that quality of intoxi- 
cated style, which, as I have said, is his ruling characteristic. In 
the genuineness of this rapt Pindaric ecstasy, he is unequalled by 
any English poet. Are we then to attribute this sudden and 
prodigal fruition of so unique a form of fantasy, with its attend- 
ant marvel of expression, to the operation of opium on the brain? 

A similar question has been mooted in the case of Thomas De 
Quincey; and in an essay upon that writer — Atlantic Monthly, No- 
vember, 1877, Vol. XI, No. 241 — I tried incidentally to show 
that the constitution of his mind and body, rather than the use of 
a drug, gave to his genius its peculiar magnifying power; that his 
style, too, instead of gaining in splendor under the influence of 
opium, was plainly inferior whilst he was writing immediately 
under that influence. With Coleridge, as we have just seen, the 
converse is true. Having accomplished the age of twenty-four, 
with no more than a few brief bursts of eloquence or delicate rays 
of beauty, in all his verse, from which greatness might be augured, 
he subjects himself to laudanum, and at once, it is true, pours out 
within a few months that short succession of darkly beautiful, un- 
surpassable chants that are to make him immortal. Yet we must 
not give too much weight to this as a relation of cause and effect. 
If emanations so wonderful were due to opium, they should have 
continued with the prolonged taking of opium. Its stimulating 
effect would in time be weakened ; but since the same mind went 
on producing poetry, we w r ould expect to see the peculiar opium 
quality re-manifest itself from time to time. But it did not do so 
with Coleridge. This year of opulent achievement passed, the 
year 1797 : and Coleridge continued poetic composition, from which, 



384 SOME MODERN AUTHORS 

however, the special visionary power we are considering was 
almost wholly absent. 

We have now in some measure explained to ourselves the growth 
of the self-surrendering power, the capacity for yielding to an in- 
toxication of melodious sound and mystic sense, which we had set 
out to study. But we by no means explain that rhapsodic gift. It 
is something beyond explanation. Could we read into the dim an- 
cestral history of the Coleridgean mind, we should at least be able to 
establish some of the sources of his mental endowment ; to ascertain 
what race put the controlling poetic instinct into his blood, and how 
the hidden fountain of tendency had collected itself in one brain 
after another, until at last it jetted up with dazzling rainbow sparkle 
in the poetry of this modern and unexampled bard. Bard he truly 
was, as Lamb, in a famous passsage, called him — though doubtless 
using the word conventionally — for the supreme quality of his 
inspiration, on which we must dwell continually, was akin to that 
of the harpers, whose voices sounded anciently along the valleys 
of legendary Wales or in the heroic courts of Ireland. 

Among the verses of his boyish years are found some lines imi- 
tated from Ossian, and the Complaint of Ninathoma, besides a love 
song from the Welsh— the last more redolent of modern fancy than of 
antique bardic feeling, but its nativity is suggestive. At all events 
those early scraps show the poet's sympathy with Ossian, even if we 
must confess that, in the manner of other poets who have verified 
McPherson's adaptations, he utterly lost their spirit in adding to 
them rhythm and metre. He was moved by the Ossianic chants, 
which, as well as the Welsh romances, are Celtic, and the peculiar 
identifying genius of the Christabel and The Ancient Mariner is 
absolutely Celtic in its nature. The suggestion of this note would, 
of course, be found in old Scotch and English ballads, whence he 
probably took it ; but I cannot rid myself of a belief that there 
was a deeper connection than this, a vein of ancestral sympathy, 
that worked to produce the transfigured beauty of old Celtic genius 
which we see in Coleridge. 

Great sensibility, and an aversion to the actual, are traits of the 
Celtic mind. The poet's tearfulness in his youthful songs ; his 
extreme susceptibility to enthusiasm, despair and pain; his 
revolt against the limits of circumstances, and alternate Teachings 
after relief through stimulants and narcotics, or through research 
into spiritual truths ; and the bent of his mind towards the super- 
natural are all indicative of the two traits mentioned. It is 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 385 

probable that in future the study of English Literature, and, in 
especial, poetry, will receive an enlarged meaning and take a 
deeper drift from the sifting of race tendencies. 

But Coleridge, not altogether conscious of the secret of his power, 
ceased to follow the lure of supernaturalism ; and even in so fine a 
ballad as that of Alice Du Clos — a product of his last period — there 
is more of the regular ballad style and succinct, connected action, 
with less of deep inner music and shadow- woven beauty, than in 
his greatest poems. He unhappily left what none but he could do, 
to write poems resembling more nearly what others were capable 
of. 

In Glycene's song, in the second act of Zapolya, there is an 
exquisite recurrence of the old melodiousness and picturing power 
of youth in this glimpse of the ' ' enchanted bird ' ' which the girl 

tells of: 

He sank, he rose, he twinkled, he trolled, 

Within that shaft of sunny mist ; 
His eyes of fire, his beak of gold, 
All else of amethyst ! 

Although Zapolya did not come before the world until twenty 
years after the composition of Remorse, this song of Glycene's 
carries us back to that great year of production from which the 
tragedy dates, with its incantation: 

And at evening evermore, 

In a chapel on the shore, 

Shall the chanter sad and saintly, 

Yellow tapers burning faintly, 

Doleful Masses chant for thee. 

Miserere Domine ! 

In recalling these last verses we can almost imagine that it is Poe 
who speaks. Poe, no doubt, studied Coleridge in a receptive 
mood; but he likewise had an inborn sense for the supernatural, 
and he was of Irish descent. It is, therefore, worth remarking 
that in this American poet, of admitted originality, inventive in 
metre and captivated with wayward melody, wherein he was no 
mean master, should be found so clear a correspondence with the 
peculiar quality of Coleridge which I have ventured to call Celtic. 
The visit of Wordsworth and Coleridge to Germany, in 1798, 
had no special influence on the founder of the new school, but on 
Coleridge's career it had a decided effect. It led him on into the 
study of German speculation, thus giving greater strenuousness to 
his always eager propensity for metaphysics. It resulted in a 
26 



683 SOME MODERN AUTHORS 

brilliant poetic achievement, the translation of Wallenstein, which 
lives to-day almost as an original English poem. It also marked 
an immediate and great change in the character of his poetic work. 
The German genius, into which he had entered so deeply, would 
inevitably oppose itself to a further development of that rhaspsodic 
power, which is so un-German in character. Principal Shairp 
discovers in the Ancient Mariner and Christabel "those very 
mental elements in solution which, condensed and turned inward, 
would find their most congenial place in the exhausting atmos- 
phere of transcendental ideas." There could hardly be a better 
witness to the truth of our theory. The momentary turn in those 
poems is a flight towards the ideal, transcending experience and 
entering into the supernatural. The}?- also involve, in a veiled 
poetic aspect, questions of sin and punishment, the struggle of 
good and evil. But all this is fused in the whirl of the writer's 
seer-like frenzy, and in the success of his visions and harmonies. 

The Druidic spirit was, according to our knowledge, highly 
transcendental for that age; but, imbuing forms like those of 
Coleridge's poetry, it gives us something as different in effect from 
methodical German speculation as a mystical religious dance is 
unlike a carefully argumentative sermon. Yet, even so, Mr. Shairp 
recognizes in this wilder and unreasoned shape the mental elements 
which, when condensed, would give as a result transcendental 
ideas. Such they did, in fact, give; but it was modern German 
transcendental. After his visit to Germany, the Saxon in Cole- 
ridge led the Celt a captive ; and the prevailing scope of his later 
poetry is, therefore, German -English, softened with gentle melo- 
diousness, touched with the grace of the classics, but rarely hold- 
ing a gleam of the old clear fire, which first made sacred the altar 
of his genius. 

One of the tenderest among the short poems — perhaps the most 
lovely of all in its sweet affectionateness of reverie — is that entitled 
The Day Dream, feignedly addressed by an emigrant to his absent 
wife. It was written in Germany, when the poet was absent 
from his family, and breathes of love and longing in these deli- 
cious lines : 

I saw our couch, I saw our quiet room, 
In shadows heaving by the firelight gloom, 
All o'er my lips, etc. 

Here is the murmur of the tempered lute, not the sweep of the 
stricken harp, though the song has Coleridge's individuality in 
both its atmosphere and motion. 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 387 

With all his shaping power and opulence of language — full of 
sympathy as he was, too, for the genius of Wordsworth, which 
went to the real as the very source of its strength, and inaugu- 
rated the modern nature-worship — we look nearly in vain to Cole- 
ridge for any revivifying magic that shall bring before us the 
spirit, color, and form of natural beauty in the imperishable garb 
of poetry. It is significant that the Biographia Literaria, in its 
elaborate defense and careful scrutiny of Wordsworth, gives com- 
paratively little heed to his fresh simplicity in the description and 
interpretation of nature, while it provides a penetrating and com- 
prehensive analysis of the essence and language of poetry. It is 
true that in his Lime-Tree Bower, My Prison, there are touches 
of careful observation of out-door sights and sounds; but the 
examination is buoyed up by no deep sentiment ; only the tame 
reflection comes at length, 

That nature ne'er deserts the wise and pure. 

A graceful and sonorous idyl in the earlier Sibylline Leaves, by 
name the "Picture," or the "Lover's Resolution" — which hints 
of Theocritus and might easily have furnished Tennyson with a 
model for some of his short blank-verse tales — contains by far the 
best, indeed the only deliberate and sustained description of 
nature that he has left. There are a few intimate and loving 
glimpses to be had through its pages, as in 

The pebbly brook 
That murmurs with a dead but tinkling sound. 

It was in this poem that he gave the birches their famous name, 
"the ladies of the wood," and these following lines were not 
written by a man incapable of conveying the sentiment of wood- 
life : 

Sweet breeze ! thou only, if I guess aright, 

Liftests the feathers of the robin's breast, 

That swells its little breast, so full of song, 

Singing above me on the mountain ash. 

I do not say that he was wholly incapable of rendering the 
external beauty of earth, sea, and sky; but he did not develop 
the germ of appreciation for these things that lay within him, 
and it was not the errand of his genius so to do. He was much 
more at ease in picturing the water snakes, that played in elfish 
light on the still and awful red of the charmed water, blue, glossy 
green, and velvet black, around the Mariner's Ship. Swinburne 
pertinently complains that this most wonderful of ocean tales has 



388 SOME MODERN AUTHORS 

hardly enough of "the air'and savor of the sea." But Coleridge 
would not have been the true Coleridge had he imported these 

into it. 

Coleridge never put nature under enchantment except in those few 
poems, which cast the peculiar visionary, not wholly natural, light 
of his own spiritual interior upon it. His dramatic works, again, 
have little of objectivity. Poets have stood for many different 
things, accordingly as their genius has provided a lens for this or 
that class of phenomena, this or that phase of intellectual striv- 
ing : Shakespeare being the poet of human nature in action, Dante 
of Middle Age belief, Byron the poet of Revolt. But Coleridge 
was preeminently the poet of his own mind. 

— George Parsons I^athrop. 

— The Poetical Works of Coleridge and Keats. With, a Memoir of each. 
Four Volumes in Two. New York: Hurd & Houghton. Boston: O. 
Houghton & Co. The Riverside Press, Cambridge. 1878. 

§ 162. William Wordsworth — 1770-1850. 

William Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth, in Cumber- 
land, April 7, 1770, and was the second in a family of five. His 
father, John Wordsworth, was a lawyer. He was descended from 
a very old family who had long been settled in Yorkshire. His 
parents, who were most excellent persons, died when he was a 
boy. He inherited a disposition easily guided to moral and reli- 
gious thought. His affections seem to have been strong. His 
intellectual tastes, his moral training, his love of nature, aided a 
temperament which easily avoided any vicious deviations. He 
was fortunate in his early schooling and companions, and in hav- 
ing passed his youth among people of simple habits ; and sur- 
rounded by picturesque mountain and lake scenery. He was early 
accustomed to active life in the open air, and, while a school -boy, 
took great pleasure in hunting, fishing, rowing, skating, riding, 
and long country walks. 

The people among whom he lived were plain folks, unre- 
strained by conventional fashions, with slight differences of social 
standing ; and he early imbibed among them that love of liberty 
and equality, and that ready sympathy with human nature, even 
in its humblest aspects, which are shown so conspicuously in his 
poetry. His life amidst the beauties, grandeurs and solitudes of 
nature, was conducive to thought, imagination and mental inde- 
pendence. He seems never to have ceased to feel and to rejoice 






WIUJAM WORDSWORTH 389 

in this early ministry of nature to his mind and character. He 
was a lover of books, too, but studied them less than he did nature 
and his own mind. While at Cambridge he was apparently quite 
as much indebted to his long tours among the lakes and the moun- 
tains of England, during his vacations, or amid the Alps, as to 
his prescribed University studies. But his chief study was evi- 
dently — himself. From youth to age this introspective habit of 
mind predominated in him. Hence that spirit which set him 
apart as a moral and religious teacher : as one who saw into the 
soul of things. Hence, too, that self- reverence, self-reliance, 
and, it must be said, self-consciousness, which characterized him 
through life. 

All the circumstances of that life may be said to have been 
fortunate for his poetical career. There was a time when, after 
leaving college, he was uncertain what profession he would choose 
for his maintenance; but a timely legacy of ^900 from Raisley 
Calvert, a young man who had known his poetical aspirations and 
whom he had attended in his last illness, enabled Wordsworth to 
pursue that career which was his choice. No less fortunate were 
his residence in Germany, his experience in France during the 
Revolution, his intimacy with Coleridge, the constant companion- 
ship of his beloved sister Dorothy, and, above all, his happy 
marriage with his early schoolmate, Mary Hutchinson. 

Happily, too, was he in living in a picturesque region, and, later, 
in obtaining a government office whose duties he could transact by 
deputy, and so be free to follow his literary work ; and last, and 
not least, in the well-deserved wreath of poet-laureate in his de- 
clining years, an office which, on the death of his friend Southey, 
he at first modestly declined, but which, being urged upon him with 
the understanding that it should involve no onerous duties, he felt 
proud to accept. 

Wordsworth at an early age considered that as a poet he had a 
great mission to fulfill. As he tells us in his long and biographical 
poem, The Prelude, the resolution came to him one early morning 
among the hills, when returning home after a night of "dancing, 

gayety and mirth : ' ' 

Magnificent 
The morning rose, in memorable pomp, 
Glorious as e'er I had beheld ; in front 
The sea lay laughing at a distance ; near 
The solid mountains shone, bright as the clouds, 
Grain-tinctured, drenched in empyrean light ; 
And in the meadows and the lower grounds 



390 SOME MODERN AUTHORS 

Was all the sweetness of a common dawn — 
Dews, vapors, and the melody of birds, 
And laborers going forth to till the fields. 
Ah, need I say, dear friend, that to the brim 
My heart was full ? I made no vows, but vows 
Were then made for me : bond, unknown to me, 
Was given that I should be, else sinning greatly, 
A dedicated spirit. 

And as a dedicated spirit he gave himself to his life-long work. 
Then what this work was let us consider. Making all allowances 
for his defects and shortcomings, there can be no question that we 
must accept the almost unanimous vote of our time, that he was 
a great and original poet. This greatness and originality are chiefly 
noticeable in the wise and deeply reflective character of his poems ; 
in their high moral and religious tone, in his faith in the ministry 
of nature to the soul, and in his expression of the religion of 
humanity. Nature and man form the substance of the themes he 
seeks to illustrate. Other poets before him have touched these 
chords, and their immortal music he listens to and loves. But 
from them he hears it come in fitful strains, often in a careless or 
inexpressionless rendering. Like a great musician, he would use 
all the stops of his organ. He would commune at first hand with 
nature. He would see creation to be a living, many-languaged sym- 
bol of the Creator. In the heart of the humblest peasant or beggar 
he can detect the heraldry of Heaven, and find in the lowliest 
daisy thoughts too deep for tears. His first passages, those that 
have become domesticated in the hearts of his readers, ring with 
interior music. In his inspired sonnets he utters lines of wisdom 
and beauty memorable for all time — second only to Shakespeare 
and Milton. 

But Wordsworth has his prosaic side ; and the truth must be 
spoken in making a fair estimate of him. Perhaps there never lived 
a more unequal poet. We follow him as we would in one of his 
long country walks, through loose, monotonous sands, over rough 
rocks and furze, and wide, barren moors, and up steep mountain 
heights into regions of clouds and sunrises and sunsets — an uneven 
path and often requiring patience. With all his genius the judg- 
ment of the posterity, to which he appealed, has by this time pretty 
clearly settled it as a fact, that as a poet he is truly great only at 
wide intervals. His verses have good health and strong limbs, 
but they too often lack wings. His muse ranges from the highest 
flights of thought and emotion down to common and prosaic 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 391 

themes, treated in a dry and didactic way ; and he often disap- 
points us in his treatment of even his noblest subjects. We are 
not lifted, not fascinated as we hoped. Why he should not have 
felt this deficiency in his cooler self-criticism, and shown at least 
a more decided preference of his best to his worst, might seem 
strange ; but such instances of lack of true judgment of their 
own works have been no uncommon cases, even with men of 
genius. Perhaps it is their very genius that blinds them. 

In Wordsworth's estimation everything that came from his pen 
had a peculiar value. It was as if he were listening to a divine 
voice, not when he was most unconscious, but the reverse. Prob- 
ably there are few examples in the history of literary men more 
marked than his complete intellectual independence and self- 
justification, from his very first appearance before the public till 
his latest. 

I cannot help regarding this self-consciousness of Wordsworth 
as a grave defect of his nature, and as a cause of his having writ- 
ten so much heavy-faced, if not prosaic verse. It is significant 
that he chose for the theme of his longest poem the growth of his 
own mind. And this trait was doubtless intensified by the soli- 
tude in which he lived. 

The truth is, Wordsworth wrote too much to write always with 
poetic inspiration. For about sixty years his pen was seldom 
idle. Moreover, he did not believe that inspiration was necessary 
except on rare occasions. If true to his creed, this was not one 
of the obligations laid upon him. He is so undisguisedly prosaic 
in the greater part of his verse, that I sometimes wonder he did not 
throw off altogether the shackles of metre and rhyme, and antici- 
pate Mr. Walt Whitman. But it seems that though he did believe 
in prose-poetry, he did not believe it his mission to write poetic 
prose. 

If he is not, strictly speaking, a poet of the poets, Wordsworth 
has the great merit, which he shares with Burns — who must have 
deeply influenced him in his youth — and with Cowper and others, 
of appealing to the common-sense, the affections, the love of 
nature, the moral and religious sentiment, of a widely increasing 
number of readers, who look more at the substance of ideas than 
their form. But he has more than this: he is deeply spiritual: 
he has the ''vision," if not always, "the faculty divine." It 
is a great boon to the thoughtful readers of to-day, to those 
who have become surfeited upon the highly seasoned but unsub- 



392 SOMK MODKRN AUTHORS 

stantial food which some of the popular poets have given us, to 
be able to turn to pages where they may find a genuine intellectual 
nutriment. And there are so many hours of life when this must 
out-value all the purely aesthetic enjoyment we may derive from 
poetry. Let us not ask too often for " winged words," for there 
are calmer moods that are content with more moderately moving 
vehicles of thought. Is there not now-a-days too much tendency 
in poetry, as in other modes of art expression, to neglect a pro- 
found or a simple utterance of thought and feeling, and to over- 
value some novel trick of manner and execution ? 

That Wordsworth was no coldly moral philosopher, but had deep 
and tender affections, his biography and letters, no less than his 
poetry, must convince us. How he mourned for his noble brother 
John, the brave commander of the Abergavenny, Kast-Indianman, 
who lost his life by shipwreck ; how he loved his sister and his 
wife; how constant are his friendships with Coleridge, Lamb, 
Southey, Sir George and Lady Beaumont, and others; how he 
was touched by the distress of the poor and unfortunate, is well 
known. 

He wrote poems that were welcomed by childhood as others 
were by youth and old age. Can we not remember the time when 
his simple rhyme of Barbara Lewthwaite and her lamb touched us 
to tears ? Yet the blase who hung enraptured on the scene-painting 
of Moore and the fireworks of Byron, laughed at this genuine bit 
of pathos. And if there be any youth or maiden who is insensible 
to the strains of the Tintern Abbey poem, or the Ode on Immor- 
tality, I can feel for such a one only regret and pity. 

His sympathy with France, in the Revolution, before that rising 
star which excited the hopes of all the friends of liberty was 
eclipsed by the bloody disk of anarchy, was a marked era in his 
life. Though the course of events on the Continent helped to 
change his political view, he had always a strong republican bias; 
and some of his finest sonnets and odes were inspired by the stirring 
incidents and commanding characters of that momentous time. 

We must, therefore, I think, rank Wordsworth among ,the 
foremost English poets. Precisely what that rank is to be who can 
say? And why weigh any poet by arithmetical scale, any more 
than you would the great painters, or tone-masters, or, indeed , 
that you would the rare flowers in a garden ? 

We remember other poets in this century who in some qualities 
surpass him. We remember the passion of the flow of Byron, the 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 393 

rapt improvisations and cloud tints of Shelley, the imaginative 
thought of Coleridge, the warm color and sometimes Miltonic 
splendor of Keats ; and, later, the fresh vigor and dramatic force 
of Browning, and the exquisite blending of poetic idea and musical 
rhythm of Tennyson. But for simple, heart-felt, graphic painting 
from nature, for tender touches of human sympathy, for wise and 
prophetic utterances of the highest thoughts and aspirations of 
the soul, what poet has surpassed Wordsworth when at his best? 

— Christopher P. Cranch. 



I will now turn to another poet, a contemporary and a friend 
of Scott's, whose influence has affected a much narrower area, 
but who within that area has probably worked more intensely. 
Wordsworth is nothing if he is not a revealer of new truths. That 
this was the view he himself took of his office may be gathered 
from many words of his own. In "The Prelude " he speaks of 

the animating faith 
That poets even as prophets . . 
Have each his own peculiar faculty : 
Heaven's gift, a sense that fits them to perceive 
Objects unseen before. 

And then he goes on to express his conviction that to himself also 
this has been vouchsafed : 

An insight that in some sense he possessed ; 
A privilege whereby a work of his, 
Proceeding from a source of untaught things, 
Creative and enduring, may become 
A power like one of Nature's. 

If Wordsworth was a revealer what then did he reveal to mankind ? 
The subjects of his own poetry, he tells us, are man, and nature, 
and human life. What did he teach? What new life did he shed 
on each of these ? He had a gift of soul and eye with regard to 
nature, which enabled him in her presence to feel a vivid and sen- 
sitive delight, which it has been given to few to feel. The outward 
world lay before him with the dew still fresh upon it : the splendor 
of morning still undulled by custom or routine. The earliest 
poets of every nation, Homer and Chaucer, had no doubt delight 
in rural sights and sounds, in their own simple, unconscious way. 
It was Wordsworth's special merit that, coming late in time, when 
the thick veil of custom and centuries of artificial civilization had 



394 SOME MODERN AUTHORS 

come between us and this natural delight, and made the familiar 
things of earth seem trivial and commonplace, he saw nature 
anew, with a freshness as of the morning, with a sensibility of 
soul that was like a new inspiration ; and not only saw but so 
expressed it, as to remove the scales from the eyes of others, and 
make them see something of the fresh beauty which nature wore 
for himself — feel some occasional touch of that rapture in her pres- 
ence with which he himself was visited. This power especially 
resides in his "Lyrical Ballads," composed between 1798 and 
1808. Such a heap of stuff has recently been written about Words- 
worth's way of dealing with nature — and I have made my own 
contribution to that heap — that I should be ashamed to increase it 
now, the more that in this, as in other good things, our attempts 
to analyze the gift spoil our enjoyment of it. Two remarks only 
I shall make and pass on. First, he did not attempt to describe 
rural objects as they are in themselves, but rather as they affect 
human hearts. As it has been well expressed, he stood at the 
meeting point where nature's inflowing and the soul touch each 
other, showed how they fit in each to each, and what exquisite 
joy comes from the contact. Secondly, he did not hold with Cole- 
ridge, that from nature we "receive but what we give " but rather 
that we receive much which we do not give. He held that nature 
is a "living presence," which exerts on us active powers of her 
own — a bodily image through which the sovereign Mind hold 
intercourse with man. 

When face to face with nature Wordsworth would sometimes 
seem too much of an optimist. At such times it was that he 

exclaimed : 

Naught 
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb 
Our cheerful faith that all which we behold 
Is full of blessings. 

Nature had done so much to restore him from his deepest 
mental dejection, that he sometimes spoke as if she was able to do 
as much for all men. But, when he so spoke, he forgot how many 
people there are whom, either from inward disposition or from 
outward circumstances, nature never reaches. 

But in his poems which deal with human life and character 
there is none of this optimistic tendency. It has been recently 
said that ' ' no poet of any day has sunk a sounding-line deeper 
than Wordsworth into the fathomless secret of suffering that is in 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 395 

no sense retributive." His mind seemed fascinated by the thought 
of the sorrow that is in the world, and brooded o'er it as some- 
thing infinite, unfathomable. 

His deepest convictions on this are expressed in these lines : 

"Action is transitory" — a step, a blow, 
The motion of a muscle — this way or that — 
'Tis done ; and in the after vacancy of thought 
We wonder at ourselves like men betrayed. 
Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark, 
And hath the nature of infinity. 
Yet through that darkness, infinite though it seems 
And unremovable, gracious openings lie, 
By which the soul — with patient steps of thought, 
Now toiling, wafted now on wings of prayer, 
May pass in hope, and though from mortal bonds 
Yet undelivered, rise with sure ascent 
Even to the fountain-head of peace divine. 

This is the keynote of his deepest human poetry. In theory 
and practice alike he held that it is not in exciting adventure, 
romantic incident, strange and unusual mental experience, in 
which the depth of human nature is most seen in its dignity. 
Along the common high-road of life, in the elementary feelings of 
men and women, in the primary affections, in the ordinary joys 
and sorrows, there lay for him truest, most permanent sources of 
interest. His eye saw beneath the outward surface that which 
common eyes do not see, but which he was empowered to make 
them see. The secret pathos, the real dignity which lie hidden 
often under the most compromising exteriors, he has brought out 
in many of those narrative poems, in which he has described men 
and women, and expressed his views about life in the concrete 
more vividly than in his poems that are purely reflective and phi- 
losophical. Take, for instance, Ruth, The Female Vagrants, 
The Affliction of Margaret, the story of Margaret in The Excur- 
sion, the story of Ellen and others in The Churchyard among the 
Mountains, The Brothers, Michael, and, above all, The White 
Doe of Rylston. It is noticeable how predominating in these is 
the note of suffering, not of action, and in most of them how it is 
women rather than men whom the poet takes for his subject. This 
is, perhaps, because endurance seems to be especially the lot of 
women, and patience among them has its most perfect work. 
Human affection sorely tried, love that has lost its earthly object, 
yet lives on with nothing to support it, 



396 SOME MODKRN AUTHORS 

Solitary anguish 
Sorrow that is not sorrow, but delight 
To think of, for the glory that redounds 
Therefrom to human kind, and what all are. 

These are subjects over which his spirit broods as with a strange 
fascination. This might be well illustrated could I have time to 
dwell in detail on the story of Margaret in the first book of The 
Excursion. Those, however, who are interested in the subject, 
should study that affecting tale, as it is one in which is specially 
seen Wordsworth's characteristic way of sympathizing with, yet 
meditating upon, human suffering. 

No poet but Wordsworth would have concluded such a tale with 
the same words. In this "meditative rapture," which could so 
absorb in itself the most desolating sorrow, there is, it must be owned, 
something too high, too isolated, too remote from ordinary human 
sympathy. Few minds are competent to such philosophic hardi- 
hood. Even Wordsworth himself, as he grew older and experi- 
enced home sorrows, came down from this solitary height, and 
changed the passage into an humbler Christian tone of sentiment. 

I have taken this one story as a good sample of Wordsworth's 
general attitude as seen in all his estimates of men. It is specially 
to be noted that their trappings and appendages and outward 
circumstances were nothing to him : the inner-man of the heart 
was everything. What was a man's ancestry, what his social posi- 
tion, what were even his intellectual attainments? To these things 
he was almost as indifferent as the writers of the Holy Scriptures 
are. There was a quite Biblical severity and inwardness about 
his estimate of things. It was the intrinsic man, the man within 
the man, the permanent affections, the will, the purpose of the 
life, on which alone his eye rested. He looked solely on men as 
they are, men within themselves. He cared, too, I gather, but 
little for that culture, literary, sesthetic, and scientific, of which 
we now hear so much, as though the possession or want of it made 
all possible difference between man and man. This kind of culture, 
I fancy, he lightly esteemed, for he had found something worthier 
than all class culture, often among the lowliest and most despised. 

He tells that he was 

convinced at heart, 
How little those formalities to which 
With overweening trust alone we give 
The name of education, have to do 
With real feeling and just sense ; how vain 
A correspondence with the talking world 
Proves to the most. 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 397 

It has sometimes been said that Wordsworth's estimate of men 
was essentially democratic. Inasmuch as it looked only at intrinsic 
worthiness, and made nothing of distinctions of rank, or of pol- 
ished manners, or even of aesthetic or intellectual culture, it may 
be said to have been democratic. Inasmuch, however, as he 
valued only that which is intrinsic and essentially the best in men, 
he may be said to have upheld a moral and spiritual aristocracy ; 
but it is an aristocracy which knows no exclusiveness, and freely 
welcomes all who will enter into it. No one indeed could be farther 
from flattering the average man by preaching to him equality, and 
telling him he was as good as any other man. Rather, he taught 
him that there are moral heights far above him to which some 
had attained, to which he too may attain, but only by thinking 
lowly of himself, and by thinking highly of the things above him 
— only by upward looking and by reverence may he rise higher. 

One thing is noticeable. The ideas and sentiments which fill 
Wordsworth's mind, and color all his delineations of men and 
nature, are not those which pass current in society. You feel 
intuitively that they would sound strange and out of place there. 
They are too unworldly to breathe in that atmosphere. Hence 
you will never find that your man of the world, who takes his tone 
from society, really cares for Wordsworth's poetry. The aspects 
of things he has to reveal does not interest such men. But others 
there are who are anything but worldly-minded, whom neverthe- 
less Wordsworth's poetry fails to reach; and this not from their 
fault but his limitations : his sympathies were deep rather than 
keen or broad. There is a large part of human life which lies 
outside of his interest. He was, as all know, entirely destitute 
of humor — a great want, but one which he shared with Milton. 
This want, often seen in very earnest natures, shut him out from 
much of the play and movement that make up life. Again, he was 
not at home in the stormy regions of the soul : he stands aloof 
alike from the Titanic passions, and also from the more tender 
and more palpitating emotions. If he contemplates them at all, 
whether in others or felt by himself, it is from a distance, viewing 
the stormy spectacle from a place of meditative calm. This agrees 
with his saying that poetry arises from emotion, remembered in 
tranquility. If his heart ever was hot it was not then that he 
spake, but when it had time to cool by after-reflection. To many 
sensitive and even imaginative natures this attitude is provoking 
and repellant. Those things about Lucy, they ask, are these all 



398 SOME MODERN AUTHORS 

he had to give to the tenderest affection he ever knew ? And they 

turn from them impatiently away to such poems as Byron's on 

Thyrza, or to his — 

When we two parted 

In silence and tears, 
Half broken-hearted, 

To sever for years, 

or to the passion of Shakespeare, or to the pious pathos of Mrs. 
Barrett Browning's sonnets, sacrificing enough to bring any healing. 

I do not wish to discuss poets who are still living. Else one 
might have tried to show the Laureate in some of his works, spe- 
cially in "In Memoriam," if he has not exactly imported new 
thoughts, tingling through every syllable with emotion . Compared 
with these, Wordsworth's most feeling poems seem to them cold 
and impassive, not to say soporific. 

But this is hardly the true account of them. Byron and such 
poets as he, when they express emotion, are wholly absorbed in 
it, lose themselves entirely in the feeling of the moment. For the 
time it is the whole world to them. Wordsworth and such as he, 
however deeply they sympathize with any suffering, never wholly 
lose themselves in it, never forget that the quick and throbbing 
emotions are but "moments in the being of the eternal science." 
They make 3^ou feel that you are, after all, encompassed by an 
everlasting calm. The passionate kind of lyric is sure to be the 
most universally popular. The meditative lyric is likely to com- 
mend itself to those natures which, without being cold, try to 
balance feeling with reflection. Which of them is the higher style 
of poetry I shall not seek to determine. In one mood of mind we 
relish the one : in another mood we turn to the other. Let us 
keep our hearts open to both. 

In a word, Wordsworth is the prophet of the spiritual aspects 
of the external world, the prophet, too, of the moral depths of the 
soul. The intrinsic and permanent affections he contemplated till 
he saw "joy that springs out of human sufferings, a light beyond 
the deepest darkness." In the clearness and strength with which 
he saw these things there is something almost superhuman. 

J. C. Shairp — Frazer's Magazine. 

§ 163. Robert Southey — 1774-18 43. 
Robert Southey, although of late years not as highly esteemed 
as he once was, when he was the Poet Laureate of England, will 
not cease to occupy a high position among British poets. He 



ROBERT SOUTHEY 399 

was born in Bristol in the year 1774. He commenced his literary 
career when he was eighteen years old by writing an essay for a 
school magazine on "Flogging," for which offence he was 
expelled from the Westminster School, and for the same offence 
debarred from Christ Church, the most fashionable College at 
Oxford. Fortunately, however, he was admitted to Balliol Col- 
lege at the same place, which, if not so fashionable, was older in 
years and more merciful. He made the acquaintance of Cole- 
ridge in 1794, which continued through life without interruption, 
and excited a happy influence upon his subsequent history. He 
engaged somewhat in foreign travel, through Spain and Portugal, 
and with the help of a government sinecure he settled down to 
literary work in 1 804 and collected a large library around him ; 
and from that time onward he wrote for the press with much 
regularity and with or no interruption. In 18 13 he was made 
Poet Laureate and pensioned by the government. He was a pro- 
digious writer both in poetry and prose. He belonged to the Lake 
Poets, of whom Wordsworth and Coleridge were leaders. Mr. 
Southey wrote apparently not so much for fame or money, but 
because he liked to write better than to engage in anything else. 
He labored under an inspiration of his own, whereby he accom- 
plished a great and useful work in his day. 

The list of his writings amount to one hundred and seventy-nine 
volumes ; and in addition he contributed to one Review fifty-two 
articles, and to a Quarterly ninety-four. Most likely he wrote too 
much, and if he had reserved some of his strength for fewer 
achievements, these might have been of a more herculean char- 
acter. Although so prolific as a writer, the mere composition was 
only a small part of the labor involved. His books show a large 
amount of study and research involved in the production of the 
several volumes. In the future his prose works, such as the His- 
tory of the Peninsular War, his Life of Nelson, of John Wesley 
or of John Bunyan, will doubtless be regarded as more perma- 
nently valuable than his poetry. He did not like Lord Byron or 
his poems, and it is well known that Byron did not like him. 
They were opposites, although both professed their wish to pro- 
mote the same end — the elevation of the literature of their own 
country. 

Mr. Macaulay gave a somewhat trenchant but on the whole a 
truthful view of Southey in the Edinburgh Review in 1830. 
Although in the hands of the reviewer, he is presented as some- 



400 SOME MODERN AUTHORS 

what of a mere infans, the estimate which he assigns to him will most 
likely be adopted as correct and truthful by fair and honest critics 
generally. See Macaulay 's Miscellanies, Vol. I. 

§ 164. George Noel Gordon Byron — 1784. — 1824.. 

At a thousand points Shelley was immeasurably Byron's supe- 
rior: he is a beautiful and enchanting spirit, whose vision, when 
we call it up, has far more loveliness, more charm for our soul, 
than the vision of Byron. But all the personal charm of Shelley 
cannot hinder us from at last discovering in his poetry the incur- 
able want, in general, of a sound subject-matter, and the incurable 
fault, in consequence, of insubstantiality. Those who extol him 
as the poet of clouds, the poet of sunsets, are only saying that he 
did not, in fact, lay hold upon the poet's right subject-matter ; 
and, in honest truth, with all his charm of soul and spirit, and 
with all his gift of musical diction and movement, he never, or 
hardly ever, did. Except, as I have said, for a few short things 
and single stanzas, his original poetry is less satisfactory than his 
translations, for on these the subject-matter was found for him. 
Nay> I doubt whether his delightful essays and letters, which 
deserve to be far more read than they are now, will not resist the 
wear and tear better, and finally are to stand higher than his 
poetry. 

Byron has not a great artist's profound and patient skill in com- 
bining an action or in developing a character — a skill which we 
must watch and look for if we are to do justice to it. But he has 
a wonderful power of vividly conceiving a single incident or a 
single situation ; of throwing himself upon it, grasping it as if it 
were real and he saw and felt it ; and of making us see and feel it 
too. "The Giaour" is a string of passages — not a work moving 
by a deep internal law of development to a necessary end. In 
' ' Lara ' ' again there is no adequate development of the character 
of the chief personage of the action of the poem : our total impres- 
sion from the poem is a confused one. Yet such an incident as 
the disposal of the slain Ezzelin's body passes before our eyes as 
if we actually saw it. His faults of negligence, of diffuseness, of 
repetition, his faults of whatever kind, we shall abundantly feel 
and unsparingly criticise : the mere interval of time between us 
and him makes disillusion of this kind inevitable. 

The end and aim of all literature is a criticism of life : the main 
end and aim of all our utterances, whether in prose or in verse, 



GEORGE NOEL GORDON BYRON 401 

is surely a criticism of life. In the laws of poetry the criticism 
of life has to be made conformably to the laws of poetic truth 
and poetic beauty. Truth and seriousness of substance and 
matter, felicity and perfection of diction, as these are exhibited 
in the best poets, are what constitute a criticism of life, made in 
conformity with the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty ; and 
it is by knowing and feeling the work of those poets, that we 
learn to recognize the fulfillment and non-fulfillment of such con- 
ditions. 

Byron 's personality is ' ' a personality in eminence such as has 
never been yet, and is not likely to come again ; ' ' and we say that 
by his personality, he is different from all the rest of English poets, 
and, in the main, greater. But can we not be a little more circum- 
stantial, and name that in which the wonderful power of this per- 
sonality consisted? We can: with the instinct of a poet Mr. 
Swinburne has seized upon it and named it for us. The power 
of Byron's personality lies in "the splendid and imperishable 
excellence which covers all his offences and outweighs all his 
defects : the excellence of sincerity and strength . ' ' 

Byron found our nation, after its long and victorious struggle 
with revolutionary France, fixed in a system of established facts 
and dominant ideas which revolted him. The mental bondage of 
the most powerful part of our nation, of its strong middle class, to 
a narrow and false system of this kind, is what we call British 
Philistinism. That bondage is unbroken to this hour, but in 
Byron's time it was even far more deep and dark than it is now. 
Byron was an aristocrat, and it is not difficult for an aristocrat to 
look on the prejudices and habits of the British Philistine with 
skepticism and disdain. Plenty of young men of his own class 
Byron met at Alma's or at Eady Jersey's, who regarded the estab- 
lished facts and reigning beliefs of the England of that day with 
as little reverence as he did. But the men, disbelievers in British 
Philistinism in private, entered English public life, the most con- 
ventual in the world, and at once they saluted the respect, the 
habits and ideas of British Philistinism as if they were a part of 
the order of creation, and as if in public no sane man would think 
of warring against them. With Byron it was different. What 
he called the cant of the great middle part of the English nation, 
what we call its Philistinism, revolted him; but the cant of his 
own class, deferring to this Philistinism and profiting by it while 
they disbelieved in it, revolted him even more. "Come what 
27 



402 SOMK MODKRN AUTHORS 

may," are his own words, " I will never flatter the millions' cant- 
ing in any shape." * * 

There is the Byron who posed, there is the Byron with his affec- 
tations and silliness, the Byron whose weakness Lady Blessing- 
ton, with a woman's acuteness, so admirably seized: "his great 
defect is flippancy, and a total want of self-possession." But 
when this theatrical and easily criticised personage betook him- 
self to poetry, and when he had fairly warmed to his work, then 
he became another man ; then the theatrical personage passed 
away ; then a higher person took possession of him and filled him ; 
then at last came forth into light that true and puissant personal- 
ity, with its direct strokes, its ever-welling force, its satire,. its 
energy, and its agony. This is the real Byron : whoever stops at 
the theatrical preludings does not know him. And this real 
Byron may well be superior to the stricken Leapardi, may well 
be declared "different from all the rest of English poets, and, in 
the main, greater," in so far as it is true of him, as M. Taine well 
says, that "all other souls in comparison with his seem inert;" 
in so far as it is true of him that with superb, exhaustless energy 
he maintained, as Prof. Nichol well says, "the struggle that keeps 
alive, if it does not save the soul ; " in so far, finally, as he deserves 
— and he does deserve — the noble praise of Mr. Swinburne ; the 
praise for ' ' the splendid and imperishable excellence which covers 
all his offences and outweighs all his defects ; the excellence of 
sincerity and strength." 

True, as a man, Byron could not manage himself, could not 
guide his ways aright, but was all astray. True, he has no light, 
cannot lead us from the past to the future : ' ' the moment he 
reflects he is a child." True, as a poet he has no fine and exact 
sense of a fine word, and structure, and rhythm ; he has not the 
artist's nature and gifts. Yet a personality of Byron's force 
counts for so much in life, and a rhetorician of Byron's force 
counts for so much in literature. But it would be most unjust to 
label Byron, as M. Sherer is disposed to label him, as a rhetori- 
cian only. Along with his astounding power and passion, he had 
a strong and deep sense for what is beautiful in nature, and for 
what is beautiful in human action and suffering. When he warms 
to his work, when he is inspired, nature herself seems to take the 
pen from his hand as she took it from Wordsworth, and to write 
for him as she wrote for Wordsworth, though in a different fashion, 
with her own penetrating simplicity. Goethe has well observed 



GKORGK NOKlv GORDON BYRON 403 

of Byron that when he is at his happiest, his representation of 
things is as easy and real as if he was improvising. It is so ; and 
his verse then exhibits quite another and a higher quality from 
the rhetorical quality — admirable as this also in its own kind of 
merit is in such verse as this : 

Minions of splendor shrinking from distress ; 
and of so many more verses of Byron's of that stamp. Nature 
takes the pen for him ; and then from an assured master of a true 
poetic style there will come such a verse as this : 

He heard it, but he heeded not ; his eyes 
Were with his heart, and that was far away. 

Of verse of this high quality Byron has much ; of verse of a qual- 
ity lower than this, of a quality rather rhetorical than truly poetic, 
yet still of extraordinary power and merit, he has still more. 
And, in spite of his prodigious vogue, Byron has never yet, per- 
haps, had the serious admiration which he deserves. Society read 
him and talked about him as it reads and talks about ' ' Hndymion ' ' 
to-day, and wdth the same sort of result. It looked in Byron's 
glass as it looks in Lord Beaconsfield's, and sees, or fancies that it 
sees, its own face there ; and then it goes its way, and straightway 
forgets what manner of man it saw. Even of his passionate 
admirers, how many never got beyond the theatrical Byron, from 
whom they caught the fashion of deranging their hair, of knotting 
their neck-handkerchiefs, or of leaving their shirt collars unbut- 
toned ; how few profoundly felt his vital influence, the influence 
of splendid and imperishable excellence of sincerity and strength ! 
His own aristocratic class, whose lyrical make-believe drove 
him to fury: the great middle class, on whose impregnable 
Philistinism he shattered himself to pieces, how little have 
either of these felt Byron's vital influence! As the inevitable 
break-up of the old order comes; as the English middle class 
slowly awakens from its intellectual sleep of two centuries; as 
our actual present world, to which this sleep has condemned us, 
shows itself more clearly, our world of aristocracy materialized 
and null, a middle class purblind and hideous, a lower class iras- 
cible, cruel and brutal, we shall turn our eyes again, and to more 
purpose, upon this passionate and dauntless soldier of a forlorn 
hope, who, ignorant of the future and unconsoled by its promises, 
nevertheless waged against the conservation of the old impossible 
world so fiery a battle ; waged it till he fell — waged it with such 
splendid and imperishable excellence of sincerity and strength. 



404 SOME MODERN AUTHORS 

Wordsworth's value is of another kind. Wordsworth has an 
insight into the permanent source of joy and consolation for man- 
kind which Byron has not. His poetry gives us more inspired 
strength . 

Coleridge was a critic: Byron, on the other hand, was exclu- 
sively a poet, and no critic. Of him Mr. Swinburne has truly 
said that "his critical faculty was zero, or even a frightful minus 
quantity." He had never even attempted to master his art, or to 
take the measure of himself and to know the nature of the mate- 
rials he had to work with. In all that he did he trusted only to 
the fiery force that stirred him, and took counsel only with his 
fierce Titanic spirit. It is by the vast strength and volume of his 
powers, rather than by any one perfect art work, that he is to be 
estimated. He does not seem to have had much ear for the music 
of metre, or to have studied its intricacies and refinements. But 
when the impulse was on him, he poured forth what was in him 
with powerful rapidity, home- thrusting directness, and burning 
eloquence — eloquence that carries you over much that is faulty in 
structure and imperfect or monotonous in metre. He himself 
did not stay to consider the way he said things, so intent was he 
on the things he had to say. Neither any more does the reader. 

His cadencies were few, but they were strong and impressive, and 
carried with them, for the time, every soul that heard them. If 
we look for what is best in Byron's poetry, it is not to his romantic 
narratives that we turn — to his " Giaours " and his " I^aras." It 
was only after attempting many styles, with more or less success, 
that at last he hit upon a style entirely his own — entirely fitted to 
express all the various and discordant tones of the wayward spirit. 
The note which he first struck in" Beppo," he carried to its full com- 
pass in " Don Juan." In the " ottava rima " — that light, fluent, 
plastic measure which he made at once and forever his own — he 
found a fit vehicle for the comic vein that had long slumbered 
within him and in his earlier poems had given no sign ; and for the 
satire that he commanded — a satire sometimes light and playful, 
but oftener scornful and cynical — yet even in the midst of its wild- 
est license and ribaldry from time to time suspending itself, that 
the poet may flash out into splendid description, or melt into 
pathetic retrospect, or brief but thrilling regret. For good or for 
evil it must be said that all the variety of Byron's nature, as he let it 
become, are embodied in his "Don Juan." 

Byron often, as we all know, affected gloom and played with 



GEORGE NOEL GORDON BYRON 405 

misanthropy, and his poems reflecting these moods are all more 
or less in a falsetto tone. The sincerest, as they are the most 
touching poems, expressive of his personal feelings, are those on 
"Thyrsa," and sincerity gives to the verses a beauty which 
once felt can never be forgotten. Over blank verse he had no 
great mastery ; and yet there is one poem in this measure, in which 
he reverts to his early love with a simple sincerity and a piercing 
pathos, which have never been surpassed. In the " Dream " it is 
the very artlessness that makes the charm. The lines thrill with 
intense and passionate sincerity. On the whole, of Byron's style 
it may be said that it has none of the subtle and curious felicities 
in which some poets delight : it is yet language in its first inten- 
tion, not reflected or exquisitely distilled, but in his strongest 
moments coming direct from the heart and going direct to the 
heart. Placed under the critical microscope his language, no 
doubt, shows many flaws and faults, but, far beyond any of his 
contemporaries, he has the manly force, the directness, the elo- 
quence which passion gives. Passionate eloquence is the chiet 
characteristic of his style. 

— Matthew Arnold, in Macmillari's Magazine. 



Mr. Arnold, although the very centre of his dissatisfaction with 
Byron is "that he cannot reflect," would probably in another 
mood admit that ' ' reflections ' ' are not what we demand of the 
poet. We do not ask of him a rhymed book of proverbs. It 
should rather be the articulation of what in Nature is great but 
inarticulate. In him the thunder, the sea, the peace of morning, 
the joy of youth, the calm of old age, the rush of passion, should 
find words ; and men through him become aware of the unrecog- 
nized wealth of existence. This is the mystery of art. A man 
with great susceptibilities may all his life long fail to understand 
something which lies at his feet, or properly to value it, until it 
has been held up before him in verse or in color. Byron had the 
power above most poets of acting as a kind of tongue to Nature. 
His descriptions are on everybody's lips, and it is superfluous to 
quote them. He painted things not as if they were outside of 
him, but with that sympathy which makes the difference between 
a dead and a living language. The woods, the wilds, the waters 
of Nature are to him 

"... the intense 
Reply of hers to our intelligence." 



406 SOME MODERN AUTHORS 

It would be difficult, surely, notwithstanding Byron's inability 
to reflect, to match these lines in their philosophic depth with any 
others in our language. His poetic success, springing from a 
capacity for great sympathies, is equally marked when he tries his 
hand with portraits of men and women. He is able to pass into 
their very soul, and essence, and thereby he makes them speak to 
us. Witness, for example, the girl in "The Island." 

The sunborn blood suffused her neck and threw 
O'er her clear nut-brown skin a lucid hue, 
Like coral reddening through the darkened wave, 
Which draws the diver to the crimson cave. 
Such was this daughter of the southern seas, 
Herself a billow in her energies. 

Passages like this might be quoted without end from Byron, and 
they explain why he is and must forever be among the immortals. 
The root of his excellence is the immense elemental force which 
dwelt in him, something which could answer the elements with- 
out him, a deep below to which the deep above could call, deep 
answering to deep. He may have been careless in expression, he 
may have been a barbarian and not euphues, as Mr. Matthew 
Arnold affirms, but he was great and consequentl}?- vibrated to 
what was great. We can hardly say anything truer of him. He 
was a mass of living energy ; and it is this which makes him so 
perpetually attractive, and sanative, too. For energy, power is 
the one thing after which we pine, especially in a sickly age. We 
do not want carefully constructed poems of mosaic, self-possessed 
and self-conscious. Force is what we need and what will heal 
us. In so far as it is force it is force, it is true morality, the true 
beauty, and the only revelation. It is the magnificent force in 
Byron which makes the accusation of affectation and posing which 
is brought against him so strange. All that is meant by affectation 
and posing was a mere surface-trick. — » 

§ 165. Percy Bysshe Shelley — 1J92-1822. 

But besides these there were two poets among their contempo- 
raries, who had something of the prophetic light in them, though 
it was a more lurid light — preeminently the two poets of revolt, 
Byron and Shelley. It was with something of quite a poetic 
fervor that each of these, in his own way, tore off the mask in the 
social compromises and hollowness, which they believed they saw 
around them ; and so they denounced the hypocrisies of the times. 



PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 407 

Neither of them, perhaps, had much positive truth with which to 
replace the things they would destroy. Byron did not pretend to 
have. Yet in the far and fierce delight of his sympathy with the 
tempests and the austere grandeurs of Nature, and in the strength 
with which he portrayed the turbid and Titanic movements of 
the soul, there was an element of power unknown in English 
poetry. 

Shelley, on the other hand, had this quite unique. He has 
caught and fixed forever movements and hues in nature and in 
the mind of man, which were too subtle, too delicate, too evan- 
escent for any eye but his own. He may be said to be the prophet 
of many shades ; of emotion , which before him had no language ; 
the poet, as he has been called, of unsatisfied desire, of unsatiable 
longing. As antidote for all human ills, he fancied that he had 
found in that universal Love with which he preached in such 
variety of tones. But one may doubt whether the love, that he 
dreamed of, was substantial or moral or self-sacrificing enough to 
bring any healing. 

J. C. Shairp — Frazer's Magazine. 



The chief and cardinal doctrine of Shelley's creed is Love. And 
by this is meant love in its most universal sense, something much 
more than individual affection or philanthropic benevolence : 
love not only of mankind, but of all creation. This love of nature 
is the central point both of his religion and his morality : his 
duty to God and his duty to Man are both alike comprehended in 
this. Shelley was no Atheist, though in the combative zeal of 
youth he may have delighted so to style himself: he was rather a 
Pantheist, believing, as we may learn from his " Adonais," in the 
all-pervading presence of love. With still less truth could he be 
called a Skeptic, since his religious or anti-religious convictions 
were fixed, decided, and thoroughly sincere. On this point it is 
interesting to compare his character with that of Byron, the true 
skeptic, who had no fixed belief and little reverence, and flew 
about from subject to subject like a will-o'-the-wisp, touching 
them with a false fire, without throwing any real or steady light 
on anything. Shelley, on the contrary, had an essentially reli- 
gious nature, filled with a profound veneration for the Good. He 
certainly believed in a future existence. He himself once said to 
Medivin that "a man was never a materialist long." But his 



408 SOME MODERN AUTHORS 

great and cardinal belief was undoubtedly in the perfectibility of 
man, the belief that the Good is more potent than the Evil, and 
that man's redemption must be worked out by no external revo- 
lution, but by the innate sense of virtue and love. 

As a rule, he was indifferent to all theological disputes and 
abstruse questions of religion. He regarded all priestcraft with 
aversion, and looked forward to the age of intellectual freedom 
and universal toleration, when, as he says in his "Ode to 
Liberty : ' ' 

Human thought might kneel alone 

Each before the judgment throne 

Of its own aweless throne. 

It is obvious, therefore, that religion in the ordinary sense of 
the word must hold a far less important place in Shelley's teaching 
than morality or the relation of man to man. It was to the cause 
of liberal morality, as I have already remarked, he devoted all his 
practical faculties. 

Virtue, according to Shelley's doctrine, must be based solely on 
natural purity of heart. There must be no restraint, no fear, no 
consideration of conventional propriety, no hope of reward in this 
world or in the next ; for an action is only virtuous when it is 
freely and spontaneously performed. In his " Essay on Christi- 
anity," Shelley strongly enforces his principle that virtue is its 
own reward, and that it must be independent even of the hope of 
immortality . 

The second method of religious inquiry, which seeks for God in 
the inner world of spirit and conscience, leads to a very different 
conclusion, even though it be but "in a glass darkly;" that 
the mirror of the Lord receives the divine reflection ; and many 
a blur of human error has been mistaken for a feature of the 
divine countenance. The prophets of all time, who have heard 
in their soul the voice of God and have cried aloud ' ' Thus saith 
the High and Holy One, who inhabiteth eternity," and the faith- 
ful ones who have hearkened to them, because their hearts re- 
echoed their prophecies, have been together keeping step, till now 
Christianity in all its more vitalized forms, and Theism as every- 
where superseding the elder Deism, alike affirm the absolute 
goodness of God, discarding everything in dogmas repugnant 
thereto. From the first method, the external, being the one to 
which Agnostics have exclusively had recourse, it follows inevi- 
tably that the result is as we see, the denial of religion, because 
they do not find in nature what nature cannot teach. 



WASHINGTON IRVING 409 

The man, who has found his God in conscience and in prayer, 
may indeed shudder and tremble ; and lift the lame hands of faith 
and grope, when he sees all the misery and agony of crea- 
tion. But as he did not find God in nature, neither will he lose 
hold on God, because it is to him inexplicable. He will fall 
back on the inner worship of God, in the Holy Ghost, the Teacher 
of all mercy and justice ; and trust that He who bids him to be 
merciful and just cannot be otherwise Himself than all merciful, 
all righteous. He will, in short, exercise, and he can logically 
exercise, faith in its simple and essential form, as trust in One 
who has claims to be trusted as one already known, not a stranger, 
whom he approaches without prior acquaintance. But, on the 
contrary, the man who has even succeeded in construing some 
idea of a good God out of the inductions of physical science, has 
nothing to fall back upon, when his researches pushed further, 
seem to lead him not to a perfectly benevolent being, but to one 
whose dealings with his creation appears so blended of kindness, 
of something that looks like cruelty, that he finds it easier to leap 
to the conclusion that he has no existence or no moral nature, 
rather than that he should be so inconsistent. 

— Frances Power Cobbe — Contemporary Review. 

% 166. Washington Irving — 1783-185 9. 

A recent anonymous writer has said that most of the writing of 
our day is characterized by an intellectual strain. I have no doubt 
this will appear to be the case in the next generation. It is a 
strain to say something new even at the risk of paradox ; or to say 
something in a new way at the risk of obscurity. From this 
Irving was entirely free. * * 

I think the calm work of Irving will stand when much of the 
more startling and perhaps more brilliant intellectual achieve- 
ments of this age will have passed away. 

And this leads me to speak of Irving's moral quality, which I 
cannot bring myself to exclude from a literary estimate, even in 
the face of the current gospel of art for art's sake. There is some- 
thing that made Scott and Irving personally loved by the millions 
of their readers, who had only the dimmest ideas of their person- 
ality. This was some quality perceived in what they wrote. 
Each one can define it for himself; there it is, and I do not see 
why it is not as integral a part of the authors — an element in the 
estimate of their future position — as what we term their intellect, 



410 'SOME MODERN AUTHORS 

their knowledge, their skill, or their art. However you rate it, 
you cannot account for Irving's influence in the world without it. 
In his tender tribute to Irving the great-hearted Thackeray, who 
saw as clearly as anybody the place of mere art in the sum total 
of life, quoted the dying words of Scott to Lockhart, " Be a good 
man, my dear. ' ' We know well enough that the great author of the 
Newcombes, and the great author of the Heart of Midlothian 
recognized the striking value in literature of integrity, sincerity, 
purity, charity, faith. These are beneficences; and Irving's 
literature, walk round it and measure it by whatever critical 
instrument you will, is a beneficent literature. The author loved 
good women and little children and a pure life ; he had faith in 
his fellow-men, a kindly sympathy with the lowest, without any 
subservience to the highest ; he retained a belief in the possibility 
of chivalrous actions, and did not care to involve them in a cynical 
suspicion: he was an author still capable of an enthusiasm. His 
books are wholesome, full of sweetness and charm, of humor 
without any sting, of amusement without any stain : and their 
more solid qualities are marred by neither pedantry nor pretension. 
— Charges Dudley Warner — Atlantic Monthly, March, 1880. 

§ 167. Thomas Carlyle — 17 95-1881. 

Mr. Carlyle, a native of the South of Scotland, was born Decem- 
ber 4, 1795, in Dumfrieshire, in the same parish in which Dr. 
Currie, the biographer of Burns, was born. His father, a farmer, 
is spoken of as a man of great moral worth and sagacity ; his 
mother as affectionate, pious, and more than ordinarily intelli- 
gent. As a school-boy, he became acquainted with Edward Irv- 
ing, the once celebrated preacher, whom he afterwards celebrated 
as a man of the noblest nature. From his father's farm he went 
to Edinburgh to study at the University for the Church, but he 
had no taste for divinity, and before he had completed his academ- 
ical course his views underwent a change. He had discovered 
that he had no call to the ministry and that his mission lay in 
another direction, for which nature had fitted him. He excelled 
in mathematics, taught mathematics for awhile. 

When he was twenty-eight years old he had fully learned that 
he was called to engage in literary pursuits, and he made his first 
appearance as an author in the London magazines. He wrote 
short biographies and articles for the Edinburgh Encyclopaedia 
conducted by Sir David Brewster. German literature at this time 



THOMAS CARLYLE 411 

had been spreading over into England, and, although not very 
popular at first, it made a deep impression upon some few minds, 
especially upon Mr. Carlyle, who more than anyone else, helped 
to make it popular on British soil. He translated Goethe's 'Wil- 
lie! in Meister in 1824 and composed his Life of Schiller. He was 
by this time filled with admiration for literary men, for whom he 
thus expressed himself in the Schiller book : "Among these men 
are to be found the brightest specimens and the chief benefactors 
of mankind. It is they that keep awake the finer parts of our 
souls; that give us better aims than power or pleasure, and with- 
stand the total sovereignty of mammon in this earth. Such men 
are the honor of this lower world ; to such alone can the epithet 
of great be applied." Up to this period he wrote in good native 
English, which everybody could understand, or at least read with- 
out a jar to their feelings. It was only afterwards when his love 
for German writers had increased, that he adopted a style peculiarly 
his own, quite original, unique, and in open defiance of what had 
come to be regarded as the only right thing, a pure, polished 
English style. 

He acquired a small estate in his own county and, in this coun- 
try residence, he wrote articles for the Foreign Review. His Sartor 
Resartus, after being rejected by several publishers, appeared at 
length in Frazer 's Magazine in 1 833-1 834. Its hero, Diogenes 
Teufelsdrockh, was a new and original character, too original for 
English taste, and Sartor found comparatively few readers or 
admirers, but he has had many readers down to the present day. 

In 1837 Carlyle removed to London, where he lectured on Ger- 
man Literature, on the History of Literature, on the Revolutions of 
Modern Europe in 1839, on Heroes and Hero Worship in 1840, 
which added much to his popularity. " It appeared," said Leigh 
Hunt, "as if some Puritan had come to life again, liberalized by 
German philosophy and his own intense reflections and experi- 
ence." This vein of Puritanism running through the specula- 
tions of the lecturer and moral censor, has been claimed as pecu- 
liarly Northern. "That earnestness," says Mr. Hannay, "that 
grim humor — that queer, half-sarcastic, half-sympathetic fun — is 
quite Scotch. It appears in Knox and Buchanan, and it appears 
also in Burns. I was not surprised when a school-fellow of Car- 
lyle 's told me that his favorite poem when a boy was Death and 
Dr. Hornbrook; and if I were asked to explain this originality I 
should, say he was a Covenanter, coming in the wake of the eigh- 



412 SOME MODERN AUTHORS 

teenth century and the transcendental philosophy. He has gone 
into the hills against Shams, as they did against Prelacy, Erastian- 
ism, and so forth. But he lives in a quieter age and in a literary 
position. So he can give play to the humor which existed in 
them as well, and he overflows with a range of reading and specu- 
lation to which they were necessarily strangers . " But at least 
one-half the originality here sketched, style as well as sentiment, 
must be placed to the account of German studies . 

In 1837 appeared the French Revolution, a History by Thomas 
Carlyle. This is the ablest of all the author's works, and is indeed 
one of the most remarkable books of the age. The first perusal 
of it forms a sort of an era in a man's life, and fixes forever in his 
memory the ghastly panorama of the Revolution, its scenes and 
its actors. 

In 1848 Mr. Carlyle collected his contributions to the Reviews 
and published them under the title of Miscellanies, extending to 
five volumes. The biographical portion of these volumes — Essays 
on Voltaire, Mirabeau, Johnson and Boswell, Burns, Walter Scott 
and others — is admirably executed. The two next appearances 
of Mr. Carlyle were political, and on this ground he seems short 
of his strength'. Chartism, 1839, and Past and Present, 1843, con- 
tain many weighty truths, and shrewd observations, directed 
against all shams, cant, formulas, speciosities , &c; but when we 
look for a remedy for existing evils, and ask how we are to replace 
the forms and institutions which Mr. Carlyle would have extin- 
guished, we find little to guide us in our author's prelections. 

The next work of our author was a special service to history 
and to the memory of one of England's historical worthies. His 
collection of Oliver CromwelVs Letters and Speeches, with Elucida- 
tions, is a work well done. ' ' The authentic utterances of the man 
Oliver himself," he says, " I have gathered them from far and 
near; fished them up from the foul Lethean quagmires, where 
they lay buried ; I have washed or endeavored to wash them clear 
from foreign stupidities — such a job of buck-washing as I do not 
long to repeat — and the world shall now see them in their own 
shape." The world was thankful for this service, and the book, 
though large and expensive, had a rapid sale. 

Another series of political tracts, entitled Latter-Day Pamphlets, 
1850, formed Mr. Carlyle's next work. In these the censor 
appeared in his most irate and uncompromising mood, and with 
his peculiarities of style and expression : in monstrous growth and 



JOHN KEATS 413 

deformity. He seemed to be the worshipper of men, brute force : 
the advocate of all harsh, coercive measures. Model prisons and 
schools for the reform of criminals, poor laws, churches as at pres- 
ent constituted, the aristocracy, parliament, and other institutions 
were assailed and ridiculed in unmeasured terms, and generally, 
the English public was set down as sham heroes and a valet or 
flunkey world. 

In 1858, appeared the first portion of Mr. Carlyle's long ex- 
pected work, the History of Frederick II, called Frederick the 
Great, volumes I and II. These volumes bring down the history 
of Frederick's life to the period of his accession to the throne in 
1740. A considerable part of the first volume is devoted to ' ' clear- 
ing the way " for the approach of the hero, and tracing back the 
houses of Brandenburg and Hohenzollern. Frederick, as Mr. Car- 
lyle admits, was rather a questionable hero. But he was a reality, 
and had ' ' nothing whatever of the hypocrite or phantasm. ' ' This 
was the biographer's inducement and encouragement to study his 
life. "How this man, officially a king, comported himself in the 
eighteenth century, and managed not to be a liar and charlatan, as 
his century was, deserves to be seen a little by men and kings and 
may silently have didactive meaning in it. " And the eighteenth is 
cordially abused as a period of worthlessness and insanity. We 
must, of course, demur to such extravagant and wholesale con- 
demnation. These idiosyncrasies and prejudices of Mr. Carlyle 
must be taken, like his peculiar style, because they are accom- 
panied by better things — by patient historical research, vivid pic- 
tures of the past, humor, pathos and eloquence. 

— Chambers' Cyclopedia of English Literature . 

§ 168. fohn Keats — 1795 — 182 1. 
Putting aside personal preferences every one must allow that 
none of the poets of the time was more ' ' radiant ' ' with genius or 
rich in promise than the short-lived Keats. His genius showed 
itself in a wonderful power of style, which, after striking many 
notes and reflecting many colors, caught from the old poets he 
loved, was settled down into a noble style of his own, when his 
brief life closed. His first poem " Endynrion," for all its crude- 
ness and extravagance, undeniably revealed the vitality of young 
genius, and reclaimed for English poetry the original freedom of 
the ten-syllable couplet, which had been lost since the days of 
Chaucer. The influence of Spenser, who was the earliest idol of 



414 SOME MODERN AUTHORS 

Keats, is strong in his tales, "The Eve of St. Agnes" and " Isa- 
belle." There is in them the flavor of the Italian poets whom he 
studied much while he was composing his Tales. The " grand 
style ' ' of Milton has never been so marvelously reproduced as in 
" Hyperion," but from this great fragment Keats himself turned 
with some impatience, pressing on to utter himself in a style more 
genuinely his own. This he attained in his odes " On a Grecian 
Urn," "To Autumn," "To a Nightingale," and in a few of his 
sonnets. In these he was leaving behind him all traces of early 
mannerism, and attaining to that large utterance, combining sim- 
plicity with richness, strength with freedom and grace of move- 
ment, which was worthy of himself. The Odes especially, so 
finished, so full of artistic beauty, flow forth into their full sono- 
rous harmonies and leave no sense of effort. In his later poems, 
from behind the love of sensuous beauty, which w^s the ground- 
work of his genius, there was coming out a deeper though tfulness 
and human feeling, which makes us more regret his early fate. 
Perhaps, there is no other instance of so instinctive a yearning 
towards the old Hellenic life as is to be seen in Keats. His thirst 
for artistic beauty could find no full satisfaction in the produc- 
tions of the cold North, and he turned intuitively to the fair crea- 
tions of the elder world, as to its native element. This is the 
more remarkable, as we know how slenderly equipt Keats was 
with what is called scholarship, and that he could reach the Greek 
poets only through translation . This classical instinct showed 
itself not only in his love of Greek subjects and Greek mythology, 
but in his wonderful production of Greek form. 

§ 169. William Cullen Bryant — 1794.-1878. 

Mr. Bryant was noted in his day as an editor — for a long time 
the editor of the "Evening Post" in New York, a paper which 
always manifested a pure literary taste ; but he will live in Amer- 
ican history more as a poet than as an editor. We here set down a 
few of the things said to his credit by a critic and friend, not as 
empty compliments but as correct statements of what he was as 
a poet. 

The love of Nature was the prevailing spirit of Bryant's poetry. 
This feeling with him was altogether intuitive. There is no meta- 
physical theory back of it, as in the case of Wordsworth, while it 
is imbued with a deeper pathos than is often discernible in 
Thompson. The feeling with which he looks upon the wonders 



RAIvPH WALDO EMERSON 415 

of Creation is remarkably appropriate to the scenery of the New 
World, and it is, therefore, original. His poems convey, to an 
extraordinary extent, the impression which is awakened by our 
lakes, mountains, forests and rivers. We esteem it as one of his 
great merits that he not only faithfully pictured the beauties, but 
caught the very spirit of our scenery. His best poems have an 
anthem-like cadence, which accords with the vast scenes they 
celebrate. 

He introduces his readers not into the gloomy German forest 
with its phantoms and banditti, but into one of those primal, 
dense woodlands of America ; where the oak spreads its enormous 
branches, and the frost-kindled leaves of the maple glow like flame 
in the sunshine ; where the tap of the woodpecker and whirring 
of the partridge alone break the silence that broods, like the spirit 
of prayer, amidst the interminable aisles of the verdant sanctuary. 

The kind of interest with which Bryant regards nature is com- 
mon to the majority of minds in which a love of beauty is blended 
with reverence. There is no mystical lore in the tributes of his 
muse. All is clear, earnest and thoughtful. This realizes the 
definition of a poet, which represents him as superior to the multi- 
tude only in degree, not in kind. Like all human beings, the 
burden of daily toil sometimes weighs heavily on his soul, when 
''the grasshopper is a burden." Then he turns to the quietude 
and beauty of Nature for refreshment. There he loves to read 
the fresh tokens of creative beneficence. The scented air of the 
meadows cools his fevered brow. The limpid stream, upon whose 
banks he wandered in childhood, reflects each fleecy cloud and 
soothes his heart as the emblem of eternal peace. Thus faith is 
revived ; the soul acquires renewed activity ; and the spirit of love 
is kindled again at the altar of God. 

§ 170. Ralph Waldo Emerson — 1803-1882. 
Mr. Emerson was born at Boston, under the shadow of Harvard- 
College, where he graduated when he was eighteen years old. At 
first he served as a Unitarian clergyman, but it was not long before 
he gave up the pulpit, and became one of our celebrated essayists, 
lecturers and poets. For several years he served as the editor of 
the Dial. He resided at Concord, Mass., and continued his career 
as a public lecturer between thirty and forty years, on such sub- 
jects, as ' ' Human Culture, " " Human Life, " " The Philosophy 
of History," and kindred subjects of a philosophical nature. He 



416 SOME MODERN AUTHORS 

published Memoirs, Letters, Essays and Poems from time to time, 
which arrested attention both in this country and England. 

Mr. Henry T. Tuckerman thus speaks of Mr. Emerson in Shaw's 
Manual of English Literature: "Whoever turns to Emerson's 
Essays for a system, a code, or even a set of definite principles, 
will be disappointed. The chief good thus far achieved by this 
class of thinkers has been negative ; they have emancipated many 
minds from the thraldom of local prejudices and prescriptive 
opinions, but have failed to reveal any positive and satisfactory 
truth unknown before. Emerson has an inventive fancy; he 
knows how to clothe truisms in startling costume; he evolves 
beautiful or apt figures and apothegms that strike at first, but when 
contemplated, prove, as has been said, usually either true and 
not new, or new and not true. His volumes, however, are sugges- 
tive, tersely and often gracefully written ; they are thoughtful, 
observant and speculative, and indicate a philosophic taste rather 
than power. As contributions to American literature, they have 
the merit of a spirit, beauty and reflective tone previously almost 
undiscoverable in the didactive writings of the country." 

§ 171. John Greenleaf Whittier — 1807-1892. 

Mr. Whittier is a distinguished American poet, reformer, editor 
and author ; a member of the Society of Friends. He worked on a 
farm, taught school, was a leading opponent of slavery, secretary 
of an anti-slavery society, and was several times attacked by mobs 
on account of his utterances ; and was sent to the Massachusetts 
Legislature ; but with all such engagements he did not at any time 
cease to court the muses. His poetical productions, legends, 
ballads, leaves, voices, portraits, songs, recreations and miscel- 
lanies, are numerous. His "Maud Miiller" made a deep and 
wide-spread sensation at the time of its publication at the close of 
the late war. He certainly has immortalized Barbara Fritschey, 
an estimable and truly patriotic woman of the city of Frederick, 
Md. Mr. Whittier in his poem narrated a number of facts con- 
cerning her, but they never occurred. He was misinformed in 
regard to Barbara and Stonewall Jackson's troops, but the poem 
illustrates very truly her patriotic spirit, as was well-known to all 
who heard her speeches in her house or on the street. Few graves 
since her death have been visited more frequently by strangers 
who visit the city, as well as by others than hers in the Reformed 
Cemetery. 



HENRY WADSWORTH I.ONGFELLOW 417 

" Whittier," says Mr. Tuckerman, " with his descriptive power 
as related to natural scenery, unites the enthusiasm of the reformer, 
and the sympathies of the patriot. There is a prophetic anathema 
of a bard-like invocation in some of his pieces. He is a true son 
of New England, and, beneath the calm, paternal bearing of the 
Quaker, nurses the ardor of a devoted friend both of nature and 
humanity . ' ' 

§ 172. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow — 180*7-1882. 

Mr. Longfellow was born in Maine and died on the classic soil of 
Harvard University, where he was professor of Modern Languages 
and Belles -Lettres for many years, surrounded by a literary atmos- 
phere and by many sympathetic friends. When he was about 
nineteen years old he visited Europe and spent about three years 
abroad, which was to a young man of his tendencies the best post- 
graduate course which he could pursue anywhere. Most of his 
works are in verse ; the smaller portion in prose which, however, 
are of a high character, such as his Outre-Mer, or Sketches from 
Beyond Sea, a series of prose descriptions and reflections, some- 
what in the style of Washington Irving. Most persons, who read, 
are familiar with the names of his poems, from the little boy who 
declaims his Excelsior at school to the older scholars in the great 
school of the world. We here name some of them: The Voices 
of the Night, Eva?igeline, The Song of Hiawatha, The Courtship 
of Miles Standish, a translation of The Divine Comedy, of Dante, 
The Divine Tragedy, or Christus, Morituri Salutamus, Ultima 
Thule in 1880, and In the Harbor in 1882. As a poet Mr. Long- 
fellow was a universal favorite in his own country, and to a great 
extent also in England, where his memory was honored in such a 
place as Westminster Abbey, a place consecrated to the memory 
almost exclusively of the great Englishmen of the past. 

Longfellow's Psalm of Life will never lose its interest or cease 
to be read without a rejuvenescent feeling, and this is our excuse 
for placing it here once more before the eyes of our readers. 

THE PSAI,M OF UFE. 

Tell me not in mournful numbers, 

Ivife is but an empty dream ! 
For the soul is dead that slumbers 

And things are not what they seem. 

Life is real, life is earnest, 

And the grave is not its goal ; 
28 



418 SOME MODERN AUTHORS 

" Dust thou art, to dust returnest " 
Was not spoken of the soul. 

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow 
Is our destined end or way ; 

But to act, that each to-morrow 
Finds us further than to-day. 

Art is long, and Time is fleeting, 

And our hearts, though stout and brave, 

Still, like muffled drums, are beating 
Funeral-marches to the Grave. 

In the world's broad field of battle, 

In the bivouac of life, 
Be not like dumb-driven cattle ! 

Be a hero in the strife ! 

Trust no future, howe'er pleasant ; 

Let the dead past bury its dead ; 
Act, act in the living present : 

Heart within and God o'er head. 

Lives of great men all remind us 

We can make our lives sublime, 

And, departing, leave behind us 

Foot-prints on the sands of time : 

Foot-prints that perhaps another 
vSailing o'er life's solemn main, 

A forlorn and shipwrecked brother 
Seeing, shall take heart again. 

Let us then be up and doing, 
With a heart for any fate ; 

Still achieving, still pursuing, 
Learn to labor and to wait. 



Thus far the reader has been supplied with sketches only of the 
few Modern Authors referred, to by Professor Nevin in his lectures, 
most probably because he had no time to do others justice ; or, if 
he did, the papers may have been lost, which is not unlikely. We 
must, therefore, say to the reader, ex uno discite. Under these 
circumstances we take the liberty of adding the following sketches 
of a few more of that class of authors. They are from the pen of 
the Rev. C. K. Wagner, who spent several years in the study of 
English Literature at the University of Oxford, England; and is 
at present Professor of the English Language and Literature in 



CHARGES LAMB 419 

Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, Pa., just the proper 
person to succeed Professor Nevin in the department of the 
Humanities in the college — his Fidelis Achates. 



§173. Charles Lamb — 1735-1834.. 
Charles Lamb was born in Crown Office Row, in the Temple, 
London, on the eighteenth of February, 1775. His father, John 
Lamb, was clerk to a Mr. Samuel Salt, barrister of the Inner 
Temple. From his eighth to his fifteenth year Charles studied as 
a "blue-coat boy" at Christ's Hospital, one of the oldest and 
most famous schools in England. It was here that a friendship, 
which proved lifelong, sprung up between him and his fellow- 
student, Coleridge. On leaving scho.ol, in 1792, he obtained a 
clerkship in the South Sea House, and two years later in the India 
Office. There was a kind of insanity in the family, and in Sep- 
tember, 1796, Lamb came home one evening from his office work 
to find that his sister, Mary, in a fit of violent madness, had 
wounded her father in the forehead and stabbed her mother to the 
heart. Mary was taken to an asylum where she recovered and 
Charles procured her release on his becoming responsible for her 
guardianship. He loved his sister ; gave up, for her sake, a desire 
to marry ; and devoted himself through life to the amelioration of 
her sad lot. They lived together in the most beautiful companion- 
ship, Mary aiding in her brother's literary work, and presiding 
at their little receptions, which Coleridge and sometimes Words- 
worth attended. When the brother's watchful eye detected the 
approach of insanity, he would take her, a willing patient, to the 
Hoxton asylum, there to tarry till the fit was over. Through all 
this strain and distress , and occasional fears for his own mental condi- 
tion, Lamb's cheerful and loving nature saved him from bitterness 
and despair, and he found courage to work. The "shreds and 
patches of the day," left him after the office drudgery was done, 
he used for the pursuit in which his soul rejoiced. As a boy he 
had spent many odd hours in the library of Mr. Salt, "browsing 
chiefly among the older English authors." This preference for 
Elizabethan writers endured through life, and their style and 
mode of thought became in some degree natural to himself. His 
first literary venture was a contribution of four sonnets to a book 
of poems on various subjects by his friend Coleridge (1796). 
After some minor works, he published John Woodvil (1801), a 



420 SOME MODERN AUTHORS 

tragedy on the early Elizabethan model, which was severely criti- 
cized, and later a farce, Mr. H (1806), which failed on the 

first performance. 

The Tales from Shakespeare were written in 1806, by Charles 
and Mary Lamb, Charles taking the tragedies and Mary the come- 
dies. They were first published in two little volumes in 1807, an( i 
have been an unfailing source of delight to each succeeding genera- 
tion of young readers from that day down to this. In 1808 ap- 
peared Lamb's Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, Contemporary 
with Shakespeare, a volume that bore eloquent testimony to his 
feeling for the literature of the days of Elizabeth and James. It 
aroused new interest in a great body of writers then largely ne- 
glected. The brief notes accompanying the selections showed 
Lamb to be a critic of rare appreciation and keen natural insight, 
his suggestions being often of more value than the learned notes 
of commentators. 

Lamb is best known, however, by his Essays, written over the 
signature of Elia, and first published in the London Magazine 
during the years 1820-24. "Written for the most part on trivial 
subjects, with no purpose but to please, they bring us close to the 
loveable nature of the man, full, indeed, of the sadness? but full, 
too, of a refined and kindly humor, ready to flash out in a pun, 
or to light up with a warmth and gentle glow the cloud that over- 
hangs him. In the Essays of Elia we see Lamb's conservative 
spirit and hatred of change. His literary sympathies lay with 
the past, and he clung with fondness to the memories of his 
childhood." To appreciate most fully the qualities alluded to, 
one should read in turn three essays : " Christ's Hospital Five-and- 
Thirty Years Ago;" "Dream Children, a Reverie;" "Old 
China ;" and for trifling, delicious humor, " A Dissertation upon 
Roast Pig." 

Lamb died at Edmonton, on the 29th of December, 1837. 
Mary, his sister, lived until the 20th of May, 1847 — ten weary 
years, spent for the most part under the care of a nurse, and with 
but "a twilight of consciousness." Lamb had saved ^2,000, 
which ensured his sister's comfort during life. 

§ 174. Thomas Babington Macaulay — 1800-1859. 

Thomas Babington Macaulay, the most popular of modern his- 
torians — an essayist, poet, statesman and orator — was born at 
Rothley Temple, in Leicestershire, on the 25th of October, 1800. 



THOMAS BAB1NGTON MACAULAY 421 

His father, Zachary Macaulay, was one of the leading advocates 
for the abolition of slavery ; established and became governor of 
a colony of liberated slaves at Freetown, Sierra Leone; and 
received, after his death, the honor of a monument in Westminster 
Abbey. From the first, young Macaulay gave promise of excep- 
tional powers. He was a remarkably precocious child. When 
he was three years old books became his companions. He had 
a marvellous memory, and soon began to "talk like print." At 
the age of four the hostess condoled with him at a house where 
hot coffee had been spilled over his legs, and he replied, "Thank 
you madam, the agony is abated." Before he was eight he was a 
historian and a poet, having compiled a Compendium of Universal 
History, and written a poem on The Battle of Cheviot. He knew 
nearly the whole of Marmion by heart, and from this time forward 
began laying up in his prodigious memory those literary stores, 
which were to constitute his working equipment. He was edu- 
cated privately, and then at Trinity College, Cambridge. He 
studied the classics with great diligence and success, but detested 
mathematics — a dislike the consequences of which he afterwards 
deeply regretted. He twice gained the Chancellor's medal for 
English verse, and in 1824 was elected Fellow of his College. 

His first literary work was done for Knight's Quarterly, to 
which he contributed a number of essays, poems and satires; but 
the earliest piece of writing that brought him into notice was his 
famous essay on "Milton," written at the solicitation of Francis 
Jeffrey for the Edinburgh Review. It appeared in August, 1825, 
and Jeffrey, in acknowledging the MS., said: "The more I 
think the less I can conceive where you picked up that style." 
This essay at once gave reputation to its author, and thencefor- 
ward Macaulay 's career was one of unbroken and deserved success. 

Several years of his life were spent in India, as member of the 
Supreme Council; and, on his return, he entered Parliament, 
where he sat as member for Edinburgh. Several offices were 
filled by him : among others that of Paymaster-General of the 
Forces, with a seat in the Cabinet of Lord John Russell. In 
1847, after a dissolution'of Parliament, Macaulay w 7 as rejected at 
Edinburgh for his generous advocacy of a grant to the Irish 
Roman Catholic College at Maynooth. Up to this time he had 
been giving divided allegiance to politics and literature ; but he 
now resolved to make a pure pursuit of literature the pleasure 
and dutv of his life. 



422 SOME MODERN AUTHORS 

" Few writers have brought to their work," says Mr. Pancoast, 
"more enthusiasm for literature, or more patient industry; few 
have ruled over a wider range of reading or collected a store of 
information as diversified and exact. Macaulay was the born 
man of letters. But as a statesman he was no less brilliant 
and successful. He was courted and admired in the most dis- 
tinguished circles ; and his wide reading, his phenomenal 
memory, his brilliant conversation, sparkling with spoils from 
many literatures, helped to make him a social and literary 
leader. To these popular qualities he added a style of absolute 
clearness, of captivating movement, and unwearied brilliancy. 
We cannot wonder, therefore, that he should have become to the 
growing circle of readers the great popular educator of his time. 
His essays, covering a great range of subjects, brought history 
and literature to the people through the pages of the magazines. 
India came home to them in his Give and Hastings; Italy in his 
Machiavelli ; England in his Chatham ; literature in his Milton and 
his Johnson . The comparative compactness with which these sub- 
jects were handled, the impetuous rush and eloquence of the style, 
their picturesqueness, richness, their sparkling antitheses, took the 
public by storm . ' ' 

The Lays of Ancient Rome, ballads written during intervals of 
political activity, have delighted a large number of readers. They 
are full of the life and heat of the old ballad style, with quick per- 
ception, clear realization, and a full sweep of animated verse — 
true, genuine ballads. But Macaulaj^'s greatest work is his His- 
tory of England from the Accession of fames If a task on which 
he concentrated all the fulness of his powers and to which he 
dedicated the loving labor of a lifetime. To enable himself to 
write this history he read hundreds of books, acts of Parliament, 
thousands of pamphlets, tracts, broadsheets, ballads and other 
flying fragments of literature ; and he seems never to have for- 
gotten anything he had ever read. These detached pieces of read- 
ing he wove together with rare cleverness into clear conceptions, 
till he saw in his own mind men of the past living and acting ; 
and then reproduced his own perceptions in words that required 
no thinking to understand. Lights and shades of truth, reserva- 
tions, subtle questionings, perceptions of the mysteries of life in 
men and nations, never troubled him. The success of his history 
w T as immediate and, in a work of this character, absolutely unpre- 
cedented. Within a generation of its first appearance upwards of 



WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 423 

one hundred and forty thousand copies were printed, and sold in 
the United Kingdom alone. 

There must be an undying charm in a work of this kind ; never- 
theless, we must be careful in our estimate of its real value. Its 
strength, unquestionably, lies in the quality that caused Carlyle 
to recommend to an invalid "the last volume of Macaulay' s His- 
tory, or any other new novel." If the stream ran clear, it was 
shallow, and to the multitude the History was good, because it 
put scenes of life into their minds without requiring them to think 
much as they read. The view taken of any man or incident was 
habitually that which accorded with the writer's predilections, 
and which could most readily take shape in his own imagination. 
Complaints founded upon the historian's misreading of facts have 
been many, and, in some cases, at least, seem to be well founded. 

In August, 1857, Macaulay was elected to the peerage, and be- 
came Baron Macaulay of Rothley. He died on the 28th of Decem- 
ber, 1859, leaving a fifth volume of the History to be published 
after his death. 

§ 175. William Makepeace Thackeray — 1811—1863. 

William Makepeace Thackeray was born at Calcutta on the 
1 8th of July, 181 1. The son of a gentleman in the East 
India Service, he was sent to England to be educated, and was 
some years in the Charterhouse School, London. He then went 
to Trinity College, Cambridge; but left shortly after to study art 
on the Continent. Finally, having lost his money by card play- 
ing and newspaper speculation, he returned to England and in 
1837 drifted into literature. 

At the beginning of the reign of Victoria, his chief income was 
from Fraser's Magazine, to which he contributed, in 1837-38, 
The History of Samuel Titmarsh and the Great Hoggarty Diamond, 
one of his most beautiful and pathetic stories. After writing much 
for periodicals, he made his first great success in Vanity Fair 
(1847-48), a serial, in twenty-four numbers, which at once placed 
him in the front rank of English novelists. In 1853 ne produced 
The Newcomes, perhaps his most beautiful work. In it he draws 
for us the immortal figure of Colonel Newcome, "the man whose 
memory we hold sacred as that of one we have loved — the strong, 
humble, simple-minded gentleman, the grizzled soldier with the 
heart of a child." In 1854 Thackeray published Henry Esmond, 
the work which exhibits most fully the wonderful power of his art, 



424 SOME MODERN AUTHORS 

and his intimate knowledge of the spirit and details of our older 
English life. It is written in the style and language of the days 
of Queen Anne, artistically colored by making the characters tell 
their story in the English of Addison and Steele. In it we seem 
to see the real, tender-hearted Thackeray, his veil of cynicism 
thrown aside. 

Of this avowed cynicism in Thackeray Prof. Henry Morley 
justly says : "Although his view of life was dimmed a little by 
experiences of a public school and of the ways of the young artist 
world in Paris, and he may, therefore, shake his head sometimes over 
a mother's faith in the goodness of her son ; although reaction from 
the weak excesses of French Revolutionary sentiment had brought 
an air of cynicism into fashion, Thackeray's ideal of life is really 
childlike in its purity. In Vanity Faij' he took, like Fielding, 
whom he did not study in vain, a broad canvas on which to paint 
an image of the world. As Fielding, in Tom Jones and Blifil, 
represented the two opposite poles about which our world turns, 
so Thackeray contrasted Becky Sharp and the Crawley side of the 
world with the side of Major Dobbin and Amelia. When it was 
said that his good people were innocent babies, that was his 
praise ; for a childlike innocence, remote enough from the concep- 
tion of the cynic, was Thackeray's ideal to the last." Thackeray 
wrote a clear, graceful, incisive English, exceptionally finished 
and charming. His death occurred suddenly on the 24th of Sep- 
tember, 1863. 

§ 176. Charles Dickens — 1812-1870. 
Charles Dickens was born on the 7th of Februaty, 18 12, at 
Landport, Portsmouth. His father, John Dickens, a clerk in the 
Navy Pay Office, was transferred from Portsmouth to London in 
1 8 14. Charles, the second of eight children, was debarred by his 
delicate constitution from mixing in boyish sports, and very early 
became a great reader. There was a little garret in his father's 
house where a choice collection of the novelists and essayists was 
stored, and these the boy eagerly devoured. In 1822 John 
Dickens, who had been retired on a small pension, was arrested 
for debt, and lodged in the Marshalsea prison. Charles, a sensi- 
tive youth of ten, was sent to work in a blacking factory, at six 
shillings a week, his duty being to cover the blacking pots with 
paper. When his father's affairs took a turn for the better, he 
was sent to school ; but his true education, it ma) 7 be said, was 



CHARLES DICKENS 425 

gained in these early struggles, and in his wide and persistent 
reading. 

His first literary work, a series of comic Sketches by Boz, con- 
tributed to The Old Monthly and other journals, appeared in book 
form in 1836. The famous "Pickwick Papers," which at once 
lifted Dickens into the foremost rank as a popular writer of fiction, 
came out originally in parts, having been written by contract for 
the firm of Chapman & Hall. From this time forward he was 
almost continually engaged in writing novels. Oliver Twist and 
David Copperjield contained reminiscences of his own life, and in 
Little Dorrit is described the experiences of a debtor in Marshal- 
sea prison. Great knowledge of the lives of the poor, and great 
sympathy with them, made him eloquent and tender in all his 
work. Through his portrayal of the shabbier and darker phases 
of existence there runs a strong, perhaps a sometime too apparent, 
moral purpose ; ' ' his pathos is often forced and premeditated ; his 
sentiment shallow ;" his pages peopled, not with real living per- 
sons, but with caricatures : and yet, take him all in all, Dickens 
is always pure, sound and wholesome. His style is easy, vigorous 
and picturesque; his power of language very great ; and, when he 
is writing under the influence of strong passion, rises into a lofty 
and noble eloquence. His humor is peculiar to himself — irresist- 
ible in its ridiculous ingenuity. But his tragic power is also consid- 
erable, though of less frequent manifestation. An all-sufficient 
witness to it will be found in the wonderful Tale of Two Cities — a 
marvel of tragic skill. David Copperjield is perhaps his strongest, 
most effective novel. The average reader comes to that conclu- 
sion, and of it Dickens himself writes : " Like many fond parents 
I have in my heart of hearts a favorite child ; and his name is 
David Copperjield '. ' ' 

On the 9th of June, 1870, ac the age of fifty -eight, the great, 
novelist was suddenly stricken down. 

§ 177. Matthew Arnold— 18 2 2-1888 . 

Matthew Arnold was born at Laleham, near Staines, on the 
Thames, in the year 1822. He was the eldest son of Dr. Thomas 
Arnold, the great head-master of Rugby, then rector of a little 
parish at Laleham. He was educated at Winchester and Rugby, 
from which latter school he proceeded to Baliol College, Oxford. 
The Newdigate prize for English verse was won by him in 1 843 — 
the subject of his poem being "Cromwell." His first volume of 



426 SOME MODERN AUTHORS 

poems was published in 1848, immediately marking him as a 
new force' in English letters. In 1851 he was appointed a Gov- 
ernment Inspector of Schools ; and he held that office up to the 
year 1885, giving a large portion of his time and thought to the 
study of educational questions. • In 1857 he was elected Professor 
of Poetry in the University of Oxford, a position which called 
forth some of his best critical work. In 1868 appeared a second 
volume of verse, entitled New Poems ; and since then he has pro- 
duced a large number of books, chiefly in prose. He is no less 
famous as a critic than as a poet, his prose style being singularly 
restrained, clear and discriminating, lighting up the subject under 
discussion in a magical way. "Arnold's poetry," writes a judi- 
cious reviewer, "has an exquisitely refined, finished, and delicate 
beauty; it reveals the critic, the thinker, and, above all, the man 
of a fine but exclusive culture. Set almost wholly in a single key, 
there are times when we weary of its persistent and pathetic minor. 
It is often coldly academic, rather than warm with human life and 
passion, and we are apt to miss in its thin, intellectual atmosphere 
just that large-souled and broadly human sympathy, which it is 
difficult to associate with Arnold himself. At times we feel, under 
the exquisite beauty of the verses, an unwonted throb of passion, 
and then we touch the highest point of Arnold's poetic art." 

Concerning his work as a literary critic this same writer adds : 
"By his insistence on a high standard of technical excellence, 
and by his admirable presentation of certain principles of literary 
judgment, Arnold performed a great work for literature. On the 
other hand, we miss here, as in his poetry, the human element, 
the comprehensive sympathy that we recognize in the criticism 
of Carlyle. Yet Carlyle could not have written the essay On 
the Translating of Homer, with all its scholarly discrimination in 
style and technique, any more than Arnold could have produced 
Carlyle's large-hearted essay on Burns." 

Arnold's widespread influence on the life and thought of his 
generation cannot be gainsaid. He has won a peculiar and honor- 
able place in poetry ; he has excelled as literary critic ; he has 
labored in the cause of* education ; and finally in his Cultuj^e a?id 
Anarchy, he has set forth most ably his scheme of social reform. 
He died in the year 1888, aged sixty -six. 



JOHN RUSKIN 427 

§ 178. John Ruskin — i8ig — 

John Ruskin, the greatest living master of English prose, was 
born in London in 1819. To his London birth he ascribes the 
great charm that the beauties of nature had for him from his boy- 
hood. He felt the contrast between town and country, and saw 
what no country-bred child could have seen in sights that were 
usual to him from his infancy. He was educated at Christ Church 
College, Oxford, and gained the Newdigate prize for poetry in 
1839. Like Thackeray, he at first devoted himself to painting; 
but soon discovered that his true genius lay in the direction of 
literature. In 1843 appeared the first volume of his Modern 
Painters, the outcome of a desire to vindicate Turner, whose 
merit as a landscape painter had then received but scanty recogni- 
tion. For about twenty years he gave his chief energies to the 
study and criticism of Art, the fourth volume of Modern Painters 
appearing finally in i860. It far outgrew the limits of its original 
design, and became, as it progressed, a discussion in splendid prose 
of the qualities and merits of the greatest painters of the English, 
Italian, and other schools. To this art period belong also The 
Seven Lamps oj 'Architecture and The Stones oj Venice. 

Since i860 Ruskin has been giving his best efforts to ethics and 
social reform, believing that ' ' it was idle to preach the love of art 
and of beauty to a nation whose standards of living be considered 
vulgar and dishonest, whose real worship was the worship of 
wealth and wordly success, or, as in his own personification, the 
Goddess of getting on.'" Against this modern, materialistic 
spirit no protest has been more direct and uncompromising than 
that of Ruskin. In such books as A Crown oj Wild Olives (1866), 
Tijne and Tide, and Fors Clavigera (begun 1871), he sets forth his 
economic theory most eloquently. It may be said to be essentially 
' ' an attempt to apply the ethical teachings of Christianity to the 
actual conduct of business and government." The true founda- 
tions of a state, according to Ruskin, are not liberty, but obedi- 
ence : not mutual antagonism, but mutual help. He himself is the 
founder of a society called " The St. George's Guild," the pur- 
pose of which is to spread abroad sound notions of what true 
life and true art are, and especially to make the life of the poor 
more endurable and better worth living. 

For many years Ruskin has been living in retirement at ' ' Brant- 
wood," his beautiful estate on the shore of Coniston Lake, Lan- 
cashire. 



428 SOMK MODERN AUTHORS 

§179. Alfred Tennyson — iSop-iSp2* 

Few poets have been more fortunate than Tennyson. His life 
was one of easy competence. In the retirement of a cultivated 
home, and in a narrow circle of congenial friends, he steadily pur- 
sued his vocation. Never did a poet consecrate himself more 
entirely to his art. He wrote no prose. He did not entangle 
himself in business. He encumbered himself with no public office, 
by which his poetic labors might have been broken. His career, 
like an English river, quietly flowed on among fertile hills and 
blooming meadows. Perhaps it might have been better had he 
lived a little less in retirement. Contact with the rude world 
might have given a more rugged strength to his verse, relieving 
in some measure the excessive refinement that is possibly its 
greatest fault. 

The principal events in the life of Tennyson are the publication 
of his successive volumes. He was born at Somersby in Iyincoln- 
shire, in 1809, the son of a clergyman, and the third of twelve 
children. After a careful training under his father, Alfred was 
sent, with his two brothers, to Trinity College, Cambridge. The 
bent of his mind early showed itself; and in 1827, in connection 
with his brother Charles, he sent forth, as yet an undergraduate, 
a volume entitled " Poems, by Two Brothers." As in the case of 
Byron, this first volume gave no token of genius. The poetry 
was correct, but dull. 

In 1829, in competition with Arthur Hallam, Tennyson won a 
medal for his prize poem on the subject of "Timbuctoo." This 
work contained some intimation of his latent powers. His liter- 
ary career really opened in 1830, with a volume of "Poems, 
Chiefly Lyrical." With much that was faulty and immature — 
suppressed by the author in subsequent editions of his works — 
this volume announced the presence of a genuine poet. He did 
not, however, receive the recognition he deserved. Christopher 
North, in Blackwood' s Magazine, mingled censure and praise — his 
censure being of the positive kind then in vogue. The poet 
resented this criticism ; and in a volume published a little later, 
we find this reply : 



*This sketch is taken from An Introduction to English Literature, by 
Prof. F. V. N. Painter, of Roanoke College, Virginia. L,each, Shewell & 
Sanborn, 1894. 



ALFRED TENNYSON 429 

You did late review rny lays, 

Crusty Christopher ; 
You did mingle blame and praise, 

Rusty Christopher ; 
When I learned from whom it came, 
I forgave you all the blame, 

Musty Christopher ; 
I could not forgive the praise, 

Fusty Christopher. 

At this period the poet's muse was very active. In 1832 
appeared another volume, which exhibited more fully his poetic 
gifts and made a notable contribution to English verse. He easily 
took his place at the head of the younger race of singers. His 
lyrical power, his mastery of musical rhythm, his charm of felici- 
tous expression, and his exquisite handling of form and color, 
are everywhere apparent. His breadth of sympathy is shown by 
his successful treatment of ancient, mediaeval and modern 
themes. 

For ten years Tennyson published nothing except a few pieces 
in periodicals. Perhaps he had been discouraged by the want of 
appreciation on the part of professional critics. But he was by no 
means driven from his art. This intervening period was devoted 
to serious study. He enlarged his intellectual range, and perfected 
himself in artistic expression. He ripened into maturity. 

In 1842 appeared a new volume, in which are found many of 
his choicest pieces. He was 110 longer simply a master of lyrical 
harmony; he had become also a thinker and teacher. Here 
appears his first work in connection with the legend of Arthur and 
the Round Table. Milton and Dryden had both thought of the 
Arthurian cycle as the subject of an epic poem. It was reserved 
for Tennyson to realize the idea ; and so well has he done his 
work that we may congratulate ourselves that the older poets 
left the field unoccupied. Almost every poem in this volume 
deserves particular mention ; but it must suffice to mention 
' ' Dora , " " Locksley Hall , " " Godiva , " " Edward Gray ' ' and 
"I^ady Clare." 

The burdening sense of loss on the death of a loved one never 
had stronger expression than in the little poem beginning " Break, 

break, break:" — 

And the stately ships go on 
To their haven under the hill ; 
But oh, for a touch of a vanished hand, 
And the sound of a voice that is still. 



430 SOME MODERN AUTHORS 

In 1847 appeared "The Princess." The author called it "A 
Medley;" and such it is, composed of mediaeval and modern ele- 
ments. Half jest, and half earnest, it yet reaches a serious solu- 
tion of the vexed problem of woman's education: 

For woman is not undeveloped man, 

But diverse ; could we make her as the man, 

Sweet love were slain ; his dearest bard is this, 

Not like to like, but like in difference. 

Yet in the long years must they like grow, 

The man be more of woman, she of man ; 

He gain in sweetness and in moral height 

Nor lose the wrestling thews that throw the world ; 

She mental breadth, nor fail in child ward care, 

Nor lose the childlike in the larger mind ; 

Till at the last she set herself to man, 

Ivike perfect music unto noble words. 

The romantic story is delightfully told ; and the songs inter- 
spersed among the several parts are perhaps the finest in our 
language. 

In 1850 appeared "In Memoriam," the best elegiac poem ever 
written, and one that will perhaps never have a rival. It is writ- 
ten in memory of Arthur Hallam, a bosom friend of Tenny- 
son's, and a young man of rich gifts of mind and heart. A 
bright career seemed open to him ; but, while travelling in 
Germany for his health, he suddenly died in Vienna, in 1833. 
The poet's heart was wrung with grief; and, under the weight of 
bereavement, he set himself resolutely to a consideration of the 
great mysteries of life, death, God, providence, eternal life. He 
does not deal with these subjects like a theologian or philoso- 
pher ; but, rising above the plane of the understanding, he finds 
his answers in the cravings of the heart and the intuitions of the 
spirit. No single quotation is sufficient to illustrate the depth and 
richness and beauty of this wonderful production. 

The year in which "In Memoriam" appeared, Tennyson suc- 
ceeded Wordsworth as poet-laureate. The greater part of his 
busy life he spent in retirement on the Isle of Wight. He was 
greatly beloved by the circle of friends he admitted into his inti- 
macy ; but the greater portion of his time was spent among his 
books and flowers. In 1855 appeared " Maud, and Other Poems." 
The principal poem in this volume has much divided critical 
opinion, but it is safe to say that it falls below his usual high 
achievement. The meaning of this poem, as explained by the 
poet himself, is the reclaiming power of love. 



ALFRED TENNYSON 431 

"The Brook" (in this volume) is a charming idyl, containing* 
a delicious, rippling inter-lyric : 

I come from haunts of coot and hern, 

I make a sudden sally, 
And sparkle out among the fern, 

To bicker down a valley. 

Whatever doubts touching the poet's genius may have been 
started by "Maud," they were forever cleared away in 1859 by 
the appearance of the " Idyls of the King." These poems were 
received with enthusiasm. Consisting at first of only four — Enid, 
Vivien, Elaine, and Guinevere — the poet afterwards wrought in 
the same field, until his ten idyls constitute a great epic poem. 
" Nave and transept, aisle after aisle," to use the language of 
Stedman, the Gothic minster has extended, until, with the addi- 
tion of a cloister here and a chapel yonder, the structure stands 
complete. These " Idyls " embody the highest poetic achieve- 
ment of Temtyson's genius, and belong to the mountain summits 
of song. Brave knights, lovely women, mediaeval splendor, undy- 
ing devotion, and heart-breaking tragedies, are all portrayed with 
the richest poetic art and feeling. Unlike the " Iliad " or " Para- 
dise Lost," which appeal to us largely through their grandeur, 
the "Idyls of the King" possess a deep human interest. They 
arouse our sympathies. We weep for Elaine, "the lily maid of 
Astolat," victim of a hopeless love for Lancelot. The agonies of 
Arthur and Guinevere at Almesbury go to the heart.* 

In 1864 appeared "Enoch Arden," a work of great beauty. It 
depicts with deep pathos the heroism to be found in humble life. 
Beauty, pathos, heroism — these are the qualities that give it high 
rank, and have made it perhaps the most popular of all Tenny- 
son's writings. Human nature is portrayed at its best; and, like 
all our author's poetry, "Enoch Arden" unconsciously begets 
faith in man, and makes us hopeful of the future of our race. 

Of Tennyson's other works we cannot speak. It is enough to 
say that they add nothing to his fame. 

The quiet beauty of his death formed a fitting close to his lon^ 



*See the Arthurian Epic, by S. Humphreys Gurteen, (Putnam's, 1895,) 
for a scholarly critique of the " Idyls of the King." In this book Mr. Gur- 
teen shows that Tennyson has very inadequately represented the old Breton 
and Anglo-Norman sources of the Arthur story, and that his pictures were 
deficient in beauty in proportion to his departure from a strict fidelity to his 
models. C. B. W. 



432 SOME MODERN AUTHORS 

and uneventful career. On the evening of the 6th of October, 
1892, the soul of the great poet passed away. The prayer he had 
breathed two years before in the little poem ' ' Crossing the Bar ' ' 

was answered : 

Sunset and evening star, 

And one clear call for me ! 
And may there be no moaning of the bar 
When I put out to sea. 
„ But such a tide as moving seems asleep, 

Too full for sound and foam, 
When that which drew from out the boundless deep 
Turns again home. 

He was entombed by the side of Chaucer in Westminster Abbey, 
while two continents were lamenting his death. 

Whatever changes of taste or fashion may hereafter come in 
poetry, surely we are justified in believing that Tennyson will 
continue to hold a high rank. There is nothing in his character 
to detract from his reputation as a poet. Though we know com- 
paratively little of his life, we clearly read his character in his 
works. He commands our confidence and reverent regard. With- 
out exhibiting heroic traits, for which there was no special occa- 
sion, he appears to us as a man of exquisite and healthful culture. 
While tenderly sensitive to all that is beautiful in nature and 
humanity, he possessed profound ethical feeling and spiritual 
insight. Keenly sympathetic with the eager and restless search 
after truth, characteristic of our time, he avoided its dangers, and 
continued a strong and trustworthy teacher, inspiring confidence 
in man, hope in the future, and faith in God. 

§ 180. Robert Browning — 1812-1889. 

Robert Browning, the most daring and original poet of the cen- 
tury, was born in Camberwell, a southern suburb of London, in 
the year 181 2. He was privately educated, and, although not a 
University man, enjoyed all the advantages of careful training, 
wide reading, and liberal culture. 

In his work "he has set himself," says Mr. Stopford Brooke, 
1 ' more than any other English poet, to answer the question : What 
is the end of life and what its explanation ? and he has answered 
this in a number of poems, narrative, lyric, dramatic, and rang- 
ing from the times of Athens through the Renaissance up to the 
present day. The principles laid down in reply are always the 
same, but their exposition is continually varied. He has drawn 






ROBKRT BROWNING 433 

with a subtle, strange and minute pencil the characters of men 
and women, of an age, of a town, of phases of passion, even of 
sudden moments of passion ; and in doing so his imagination has 
wrought hand-in-hand with Thought, which, inventing as it winds 
through its subject, has perhaps too much scientific pleasure in 
itself. Art, music, classical learning, the semi-paganism of the 
Renaissance, the remoter phases of early Christianity, have each, 
in specialized phases of them, been set vividly into poetry by his 
work. He has excelled, when he chose, in light narrative, in 
lyrics of love and of war. Natural scenery, and especially that of 
Italy, he paints with fire, but he does his best work when the 
landscape is, like his character, a special or a strange one. He is 
an intellectual poet, but neither imagination nor the passion of 
his subject fails him." 

Browning's language is almost always hard to understand ; and 
this vagueness of expression, combined with intricacy of idea, 
proves an insuperable barrier to the casual reader. To the serious 
student, however, the meaning, when he has once got at it, is 
well worth all the trouble that may have been taken to reach it. 
His poems are fuller of thought, and richer in experience than 
those of any other English writer except Shakespeare. As Prof. 
Meiklejohn puts it : "The thoughts and emotions, which throng 
his mind at the same moment, so crowd upon and jostle each 
other, become so inextricably intermingled, that it is very often 
extremely difficult for us to make out any meaning at all. Many 
of his thoughts are so subtle and profound that they cannot easily 
be drawn up from the depths in which they lie. No man can 
write with greater directness, greater lyric vigor, fire and impulse, 
than Browning when he chooses ; but it is very seldom that he 
does choose. The infinite complexity of human life, and its mani- 
fold experiences have seized and imprisoned his imagination ; and 
it is not often that he speaks in a clear, free voice." 

Browning has been one of the most prolific of English poets. 
His work covers more than half a century of almost incessant pro- 
duction, exhibiting a creative energy hardly surpassed by any 
poet since Shakespeare. In 1835, at the age of twenty-three, he 
produced his first poem, " Paracelsus ; " and on the very day of 
his death, the 12th of December, 1889, the last volume, " Aso- 
lando," issued from the press. 

In ' ' Paracelsus " he at once faced one of the main issues in the 
life of our own day ; and in all his subsequent work he has satisfied, 
2 9 



434 some: modern authors 

as no other poet has done, some of the deepest spiritual needs of 
his generation. Wordsworth had learnt and taught that by wild 
effort to reach at once the far ideal, society gains less than by the 
quiet labor of each one to do his daily duty. In accordance with 
this teaching Browning, in "Paracelsus," made poetic use of the 
troubled life of a self-confident aspirant who lived in the sixteenth 
century, and fashioned him into the type of a man yearning with 
an indefinite sense of power, and filled with a hope not unlike that 
of many a young heart in Europe in the days of the French Revo- 
lution. It was, in other words, the story of a man who had lost his 
way in the mazes of thought about life — about its why and where- 
fore — about this world and the next — about himself and his rela- 
tions to God and his fellowmen. 

In his next poem, "Sordello," published in 1840, Browning, 
having taken Dante as the standard of the poet who should be a 
worker with the men, whose thought he helps to shape and raise, 
draws a representative figure of a poet before Dante, and paints 
the development of the poetic energy in this direction. Thus 
dealing from another point of view with human aspiration, he 

teaches a like lesson : 

1 
God has conceded two sights to a man — 

One of men's whole work, time's completed plan ; 

The other of the minute's work, man's first 

Step to the plan's completion. 

And so, in all his subsequent verse, Browning was most faithful in 
his maintenance of the true human relation between the far ideal 
and the near. No conception of a better future for humanity can 
be too perfect ; but the way to its realization is only by patient use 
of ordinary powers for the sure footing of each day's journey to 
the distant heights. To him the only explanation of the mystery 
and the misery of this present life is to be found in its relation to 
a life to come. His view of life is essentially spiritual. To him 
,God, the soul, and personal immortality are the fundamental and 
all-important facts. In a famous prose passage, he has declared, 
that nothing but the soul "is worth study." To him it is worth 
study because it only of things earthly will survive the temporal, 
because it sustains a definite relation to the eternal sphere of 
things. The development of the soul in this relation to the unseen 
is consequently the chief subject of Browning's work, as it is — in 
his judgment — the supreme interest of life. 

The exceeding bulk of Browning's work makes any specific 



ROBERT BROWNING 435 

criticism of it impossible in this slight sketch. He wrote many 
plays, but it is doubtful whether in any one he succeeded in meet- 
ing the requirements of the stage. They are far better adapted to 
the seclusion of the study, and as ' ' closet dramas ' ' possess conspic- 
uous merit. Indeed, while Browning is not a dramatist, a large 
proportion of his poems, monologues, idyls, and lyrics are dis- 
tinctly dramatic both in spirit and form. As a rule, however, his 
best work is found in his shorter poems. "Men and Women" 
(1855) contains many of the best of these, but characteristic 
masterpieces are scattered through his books, down to " Rephan " 
in "Asolando" (1889). "The Ring and the Book" (1868), a 
huge poem of more than twenty-one thousand lines, stands out as 
his greatest achievement ; and it is most probably by this that his 
name will live in future ages. This work is in reality a series of 
dramatic monologues, a department of poetry in which Browning 
is supreme. It is epic only by its length and by the underlying 
unity of its design. His most ambitious work is, therefore, a 
modification of his chosen poetic form. 

In concluding an admirable estimate of Robert Browning in his 
recently published Introduction to English Literature (1894), Mr. 
Henry S. Pancoast says: "With an intellectual force comparable 
to Dryden's, a moral ardor equal to that of Milton, Browning, too, 
is poet as well as thinker and teacher. He is no mere reasoner in 
verse, but the most profoundly passionate singer of his time. 
Through all his work there shines the noble spirituality, the mar- 
velous subtlety, the strenuous earnestness of a great nature. Back 
of all stands the man, Robert Browning, who sings of himself, in 
words which are at once an epitaph and a closing song of triumph, as 

"One who never turned his back but marched breast forward, 

Never doubted clouds would break, 
Never dreamed, tho' right were worsted, wrong would triumph, 

Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, sleep to wake."* 

Thus in this great English poet of our own day we find that 
deep religious earnestness, that astounding force, which existed in 
those obscure English tribes who nearly fifteen centuries ago began 
to possess themselves of the island of Britain. Henry Morley 
reminds us that the opening lines of Caedmon's "Creation," the 
first words of English literature on English soil, are words of 
praise to the Almighty Maker of all things.' After reviewing in 



^Epilogue in "Asolando," Browning's last poem. 



436 SOME MODERN AUTHORS 

outline the long and splendid history of the literature thus sol- 
emnly begun, we find in the two greatest poet- voices of our own 
day, Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning, the note of an invin- 
cible faith, an undiminished hope; we find them affirming, in the 
historic spirit of the English race, 

Thy soul and God stand sure. 

The limits of this work forbid a review of many other note- 
worthy writers, both dead and living, whose contributions to our 
literature merit the student's serious attention. We have been 
able to choose only those whose work seems to us, in quality and 
importance, unquestionably preeminent. 

Among poets not already noticed we must at least mention the 
names of Leigh Hunt, Thomas Hood, Arthur Hugh Clough, Mrs. 
Browning, Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William 
Morris, Lewis Morris, Algernon Charles Swinburne and William 
Watson. 

From a host of skilled writers in the several departments of 
prose, we can select only a few of the higher rank : Arthur Henry 
Hallam, Walter Savage Landor, John Wilson ("Christopher 
North"), John Henry Newman, Edward Bouverie Pusey, Jane 
Austen, " George Eliot," Henry Hart Milman, Edward A. Free- 
man, John Richard Green, James Anthony Froude, John Stuart 
Mill, Charles Kingsley, Edward Lytton Bulwer, George Mere- 
dith, Robert Louis Stevenson, Thomas Hardy, John Addington 
Symonds, Walter Pater, and others. 



Three poets, in three distant ages born, 
Greece, Italy, and England did adorn, 
The first in loftiness of thought surpassed, 
The next in majesty : in both, the last. 
The force of nature could no further go : 
To make a third, she joined the other two. 

-Dryden. 



PART VI 

SELECTIONS FROM PROFESSOR NEVIN'S WRITINGS 



§ 181. National Taste. 

An Address delivered before the Goethean Literary Society of Marshall 

College ', at its Anniversary \ August 28, 1844, by Wm. M. Nevin, Esq. 

Gentlemen : — 

The circumstances under which we are this day permitted to 
assemble are peculiarly animating. To dwell upon them now, 
for the purpose of engaging your interest, would be utterly out of 
place. Your countenances, beaming with pleasure, announce 
that you are already all awake to their importance. The Anniver- 
sary of Goethe's birthday has, for years, been met by your Society 
with an appropriate celebration ; but from this time forward, the 
solemnity will come round with new significance and weight. 
This day has the barge of our expectations been moored on the 
shore of certainty. Poets may tell us of Hope's being pleased 
with the distance, and that she delights to feed on the mountain's 
" azure hue," and all that ; but to me it seems that such diet is 
entirely too thin for her ladyship ; and how much better at all 
events does she look and how much brighter is her eye and how 
much healthier and happier in appearance is her cheek, when, as 
now, she is permitted to grasp, for the first time, some earnest of 
what is contained in her visions. The easy hand of Opulence 
may raise her buildings almost without an effort ; but the occa- 
sion which is to make this day memorable, has been reached by 
your Society only after months of toil and travel and canvassing 
and self-denial on the part of her members. Many discourage- 
ments have been sustained, and many difficulties surmounted, in 
coming to the position you have now gained ; and on this account 
it is that the ceremonies of the present day partake of the joy ful- 
ness of a triumph. The money, which is causing the Goethean 
Hall and her twin-sister building to be erected, on our college 
grounds, has been gathered far and near from the hands of the 
good and the liberal ; and certainly the rising of structures like 
these, considering the worthiness of their object, should be 

437 



438 SELECTIONS FROM PROFESSOR NEVIN'S WRITINGS 

greeted with gladness by every true patriot in the country ; for 
they denote, beyond a doubt, that a deeper interest is at least 
beginning to be felt abroad in the advancement of our literature. 

The Mechanical Arts bring their own reward ; and capital in- 
vested in railways and canals, if properly managed, returns a hand- 
some revenue to the States or companies that have constructed 
them ; but Institutions for the advancement of literature or the 
Fine Arts, though requiring, from Government or the com- 
munity, an equal aid in order that they may prosper, still give 
back no equivalent in dollars and cents. They are neither 
labor-saving nor money-making machines ; and yet they are good 
things in a country notwithstanding. I am aware, indeed, that 
many persons think otherwise. They suppose that the Fine Arts, 
at any rate, are no great acquisition to a country. They seem to 
think that these are beggarly Graces at best, that require to keep 
them, in proper order and respectability, an enormous outlay of 
money ; while the community is nothing the better for their keep- 
ing. They may do well enough, they cry, to be taken into the 
houses of the great and kept, like their canary birds or poodle 
dogs, to be played with, or nursed, for the sake of fashion or 
frivolity ; but what advantage do they ever bring to the poorer 
classes of society — the bone and sinew of the land ? Their 
votaries, and certainly their patrons, are made nothing the richer 
by their presence, and were they all starved out of a community it 
would be no great loss. To such persons, should a nation dare 
to bestow anything for their maintenance, it would seem like 
downright extravagance. 

Far be it from me to speak disparagingly of the Useful Arts, 
as distinguished from the Fine. All must be pleased with the 
progress they are constantly making in this our patent age, as it 
has been styled, of new inventions. They bring power and 
wealth in their train, and talents of the highest order are required 
for their advancement. Still it should not be forgotten that their 
object is either to satisfy simply the physical wants of man, or to 
serve as means towards something beyond themselves. All this 
is well enough in its place. It is possible, however, for a nation 
to be so wholly taken up with such interests as to neglect 
altogether the culture of its nobler faculties. In giving them its 
whole attention, such a nation will necessarily exhibit a one-sided, 
unnatural development. The butterfly, when she has burst her 
chrysalis, in order that she may unfold her wings for the first 



NATIONAL TASTE 439 

time in their beauty, must employ the deepest internal strivings. 
These she is taught to exert by instinct ; but the imaginative 
faculty of a nation can be brought out only by the will, and wish, 
and efforts, of the people themselves. Should this be wanting, 
the nation may grow large and powerful, to be sure, like a Poly- 
phemus, capable of hurling rocks of defiance, and yet stand in no 
great honor with its neighbors after all. It is not by steam 
power and machinery that humanizing influences are to be 
extended. The tendency of these to soften the affections and im- 
prove the taste is no stronger than it is to excite feuds and battles. 
Canal boats and steam cars have added much to the ease and speed 
of travelling, and the conveyance of merchandise, but they can 
never be so improved as to carry their passengers the whole way to 
happiness. They contribute a great deal to the outward strength 
and wealth of a people, but a very little to their spiritual aggran- 
dizement. By being wholly taken up with the useful arts a com- 
munity may become enterprising, bustling, money-loving and 
cunning ; but this is not the same thing as being a great, a good, 
and a happy people. In the Vicar of Wakefield we laugh at poor 
Moses, when he returns home from the Fair, thinking to delight 
the family with his purchase of the gross of green spectacles ; and 
yet, considering the moral worth of the lad, and how well he had 
been instructed by his father in better things than over-reaching, 
it seems to me that it would be well for any country if it were 
filled with spirits of the same kind. To be very shrewd in making 
a bargain is not the first accomplishment towards which ' ' the 
young idea " should be trained. The mere art of acquiring gain 
deserves not the chief, but least attention from education ; as, in 
fact, there is some danger of its being too deeply inculcated, and, 
in this way, unfitting the mind for happier impressions. 

The acquirement of wealth being the grand object of the useful 
arts, a people wholly taken up with them may be in some danger 
of setting too high an estimate on money, and suppose it capable 
of conferring on them all possible enjoyments. Impressed with 
this belief, no wonder that some of them, whose moral training 
may perhaps have been neglected in their youth, should become 
weary and dissatisfied with the slow, hard earnings of honest 
industry, and be induced to snatch this, in their opinion, the 
highest good, by the speedier arts of fraud, embezzlement or specu- 
lation. In traffic they may be tempted to try trickery instead of 
honest dealing, and false recommendations instead of candid state- 



440 SELECTIONS FROM PROFESSOR NEVIN'S WRITINGS 

ments. Juvenal complains that in his day " destructive Money," 
though unhonored with a temple, which, in truth, she had no 
power to command, as her charms have ever been incapable of 
pleasing the Fine Arts, those fashioners of fanes and statues, was 
nevertheless more devoutly worshipped by his fellow-citizens than 
were the fairer forms of Peace, Faith and Virtue, that were 
honored with tasteful temples. In our day, however, her majesty 
in some countries, is not satisfied with being preferred before all the 
Graces in the world ; but at times, so sovereign has become her 
sway, she seems as if she would not care a great deal to banish 
from the land, if not Peace, at least Faith and Virtue altogether. 
Considering the evil tendencies of an over-thirst for gain, it is 
not improbable then, that while inventions are progressing, the 
man himself may be retrograding. The material world by claim- 
ing his whole attention, may be pressing, like an incubus, on his 
moral nature, paralyzing and smothering it ; and while rejoicing 
in the improvements of his age he may be in great danger of be- 
ing left on the background, as it regards his own person, in all 
spiritual respects. 

To counteract such tendencies and complete a nation's glory, 
I would by no means say that the Fine Arts are all sufficient. 
They are not the causes, but the signs, of something better than 
themselves. Of the nation that puts them forth, they tell us, as 
plainly as do blossoms of a tree, that it is capable also of produc- 
ing fruit. They show us that the affections of the people are warm, 
and that their perception of what is great and beautiful in morals 
is keen and unclouded. This is well exhibited in those works of 
Art that have been fashioned in different countries to tell of the 
virtues of departed worth. When any one of natural feelings has 
been deprived of the object of his affections, at first, to be sure, he 
may seek relief only in tears ; but as time softens his grief, he has a 
pleasure in dwelling on the amiable traits of character of the lost 
one, and these he is wont to associate with his Ideal of the 
beautiful. Then, to give the whole^n outward form, the desire 
within him is as natural as at first was; t)jat.of shedding tears ; and 
this he seeks to do, at least as far aS)[h|$: abilities will permit, by 
means of the Fine Arts. If he be ^jippejfc) he will express his 
thoughts in verse ; if a sculptor, in some cjiase symbolic carvings ; 
or if a man of taste merely without skill in execution, he will, at 
any rate, plant some shrubbery near the grave. This he does, 
not so much to gratify others as to relieve and satisfy his own 



NATIONAL TASTE 441 

breast. The modern Goth, or Vandal, or utilitarian, may look 
on his workstwith a cold, careless eye, and inquire: Cut bono? 
but the man of sensibility and refinement is moved, not so much 
by their abstract grace, as because, being possessed with the same 
humanity that prompted their execution, he feels within himself 
the deep influences of their pathos ; and by them he is assured 
not only of the worthiness of the departed, but also that the living 
mourner himself must be endowed with virtuous sentiments. 

The artist's imaginings, however, spring not merely from his 
own private j©ys and sorrows. He is capable also of entering 
fully into the feelings of others. Not isolated, but attached to his 
kindred and countrymen, his heart bounds with theirs in all their 
emotions, and surpassing them in skill and fancy, he can give out- 
ward expression to their sentiments, where they had no power to 
do it themselves. A country's science may be restricted to a few 
philosophers. Even her artizans, though skilled in their several 
callings, may be satisfied with catching at the results of Philosophy, 
and applying them to practice, without caring much about the 
investigations ; but the whole people must sympathize with her 
poets and artists. They must be capable, too, of something better 
than a cold approval. They must themselves be teeming, as it 
were, with great and beautiful ideas, struggling for expression, 
and then will these proclaimers of their feelings spring up as a 
matter of course. The Fine Arts, therefore, are a nation's voice, 
and the sign of her moral improvement. Epic poetry, it is true, 
may rise almost on the confines of savage life itself; but it 
carries in it, in such case, a glorious promise for the future. To 
tinge the past with grandeur, it may cast its descriptions, like stain - 
ings of sunlight, on the far off, setting thunder clouds of war, but 
it denotes at the same time, that a tranquil sky has succeeded. It 
is well symbolized by one of those majestic burr oaks of our West- 
ern States, which stand not in the thick woods of barbarism nor 
yet often in the cultivated prairie, but in those openings, as they 
are called, of scattered trees, that dawn between ; a certain indi- 
cation of the fertility of the soil beneath. Lyric poetry, however, 
with its accompanying music, though less sturdy and expanded, 
rises up more frequently among a polished people. Like the 
laughing vine it delights to throw its clusters of beauty and sweet- 
ness over a cultivated country. The Drama, Painting and Sculp- 
ture arrive at perfection still further in advance. To give their 
groupings a happy finish, requires taste, and a power of nicely dis- 



442 SELECTIONS FROM PROFESSOR NEVIN'S WRITINGS 

criminating between right and wrong, and of assuming the char- 
acters and feelings of others, that can be attained fco and appre- 
ciated by a people only in a high state of cultivation. 

The Arts have always been associated with the religion of a 
country. To give an outward form to the idea of virtue is their 
grand design; which, to be sure, must always be modified by the 
peculiar customs, manners and notions of the artist and his 
countrymen. Religion then, being the highest manifestation of 
virtue, they have always been associated with her rites and cere- 
monies. They are naturally the handmaids of Christianity; and 
if other influences prevail not to keep them out of the land, and 
they be not debarred her presence by bigotry or the strife of 
sects, whatever garb she may assume, they follow in her train, 
they decorate her temples, they aid in her w T orship, they bow at 
her feet, and catch inspiration from her lips ; and never c!b their 
efforts rise so high in beauty or sublimity as when exerted in 
representing the moral scenes that she has consecrated. 

It is alleged, however, that they may be made subservient to 
immorality. I know well enough that lewd songs and lascivious 
paintings have been thrown abroad on the world, and that some 
master spirits have occasionally had a hand in their production ; 
but I know, too, that by so doing they have degraded their genius. 
Vice is odious. It is ugly in its very nature; and the poet or 
painter, who describes it as being othervise, is in that particular, 
at any rate, devoid of taste. The Arts speak only through the eye 
or ear, and should hold no parley with the lower senses. Being 
the handmaidens of Virtue, if made to subserve Vice, they are 
turned from their legitimate calling. They have dropped from 
their high estate to consort with beings of the basest sort. Or, 
rather, I should say that, in such a case, the poet or the painter 
has become affected, by the licentiousness of his age, as a man, 
and that the muse or the grace that presides over his pen or pen- 
cil, on observing its new creations, starts back abashed, and like 
Virgil's grafted tree, not, however, in pleasure, but with the 
deepest scorn and indignation, 

Miratur — novas frondes, et non sua poma. 
Be this as it may, the works of art, by being susceptible of having 
thus engrafted on them, as if beauties, the favored sins of a nation, 
become to us still better criteria of national character. They are 
capable of telling not only that a people have arrived at a high 
state of civilization, but also when they are becoming tainted with 



NATIONAL TASTE 443 

its besetting vices. But as artistic creations always become sickly 
and at last cease under the corruption of taste and morals conse- 
quent on luxury, they cannot long bear thick upon them these 
1 ' blushing honors. ' ' 

The development of the arts of a country, it must be allowed, 
may be owing in some measure to its natural advantages. The 
Dorians, and other tribes of ancient Greece, while struggling 
onward towards glory and civilization, had their affections and 
patriotism warmed besides by the scenery of their country. From 
being covered with the softest sky, and surrounded by the freshest 
landscapes in nature, their imaginations were strengthened, and 
their ideas clad in new beauty, which enabled them at length to 
produce those poems, odes and plastic works, that have called 
forth the admiration of all succeeding civilized nations. In the 
Middle Ages, too, the young Republics of Italy, who, without imi- 
tating, almost surpassed, in some departments of the arts, the 
States of ancient Greece, were favored also with a most genial 
climate and romantic country. Independently, however, of the 
influence of scenery, which in both cases would be somewhat 
alike, the works of each are distinguished by national peculiari- 
ties ; those of Greece bearing, among other things, the impress of 
a purer patriotism ; and those of Italy, of a holier religion, though 
obscured, for the time, in a measure, it is true, by the over- 
shadowings of pomp and superstition. In modern times, too, as 
already hinted at, the arts are less attended to, on account of the 
absorbing interests of other employments. From the important 
discoveries of modern science, the pursuits of men have taken a 
more practical turn. Fancy has yielded in a great measure to 
sober calculation, and the arts properly so called, to the useful arts. 

Notwithstanding, however, the wrong purposes the arts may be 
made at times to serve, and with full allowance for their depend- 
ence on outward circumstances, as well as for the unfavorable 
bearings of the practical spirit that distinguishes our own age, I 
would still maintain that they are a proper sign of moral advance- 
ment ; and that no nation, of any age or clime, has ever attained, 
or ever can attain to any very high state of civilization, without 
having first put them forth. Even in the midst of great faults, if 
these be cherished by a people, we must conclude that some good 
traits are to be met with in their character ; but where they are 
neglected, on the other hand, whatever other advantages may be 
present, there must be something wrong — something rotten in 



444 SELECTIONS FROM PROFESSOR NEVIN'S WRITINGS 

Denmark, as they say; though in this case, to be sure, some other 
countries might serve the proverb just as well at least as honest 
Denmark. A hard and perhaps too sweeping assertion is that of 
Shakespeare about ' ' the man that has no music in himself, " as, no 
doubt, some persons are exceptions to his rule; in their case the 
eye, and not the ear, being the inlet to their soul's pleasures. But 
so much we may assert at least : that if a whole people be found 
altogether incapable of the creations of art, in every form, then, 
indeed, must their affections be for the most part dark and the 
motions of their spirits dull ; and, if not just fit for downright 
treasons, they can hardly fail to be well qualified, at all events, for 
having a hand in "stratagems and spoils." 

In Germany, on the .Sabbath, when the bells have ceased their 
chiming, those peals of music, some of them having been first 
started into melody by Mozart or Beethoven, could not, one would 
suppose, swell so solemnly and thrillingly, as they do, from the 
churches; and on week days, of an evening, when the sun has 
left his blush on the clouds, ere darkness has closed around, those 
tones produced by the laborer's flute, accompanied by the voices 
of his wife and daughters, could not certainly float abroad so 
sweetly, as they do from almost every cottage in the country, if 
the hearts of the populace at large were not endowed with the 
warmest religious and social affections. So of England, too, 
though in the arts perhaps surpassed by both Germany and 
France. Should any person unacquainted with her history be 
permitted to -look on the tasteful works of Sculpture that set off 
the interior of her minsters, and those splendid collections of 
paintings that adorn the mansions of her nobles ; and especially 
should he be drawn still further onward to wander over the coun- 
try by observing the marks of taste in her landscape gardening 
everywhere exhibited, he surely could not help inferring that her 
people generally were happy on account of their morality . Were he , 
however, informed that many of them were vicious and miserable 
notwithstanding; without further information on the subject, he 
would be led to conclude that the causes of this, in all likelihood, 
were in some way connected more intimately with the manufac- 
turing establishments than with ' ' the blossomed hedges and cot- 
tage homes of England." 

On turning to our own country, while of her internal improve- 
ments and mechanical inventions we may well be proud, we must 
admit that in the arts she is inferior to most European nations. 



NATIONAL TASTE 445 

She has, it is true, given birth to some distinguished artists, whose 
early genius also was nursed among the splendid imagery of her 
streams and mountains ; but these, for want of encouragement and 
sympathy at home, have generally been drawn abroad to reside in 
foreign countries. Taste for the fine arts, therefore, cannot be 
said to constitute a characteristic trait of the American people. 
Indeed so deficient in this respect are we said to be that some have 
even gone so far as to allege that were the Venus de Medici set up 
in any of the public squares of our cities, she would stand a fair 
chance, without the help of a riot even, to have her nose demol- 
ished by some passer-by, in the way simply of a practical joke; 
and that were the old mulberry tree of Shakespeare, the Yardley 
oak of Cowper or the ' ' twa elms ' ' of Allan Ramsa}^ flourishing in 
some parts of our country, there would be no security that they 
might not be felled and cut into fragments by the owners of the 
soil they shaded ; not, of course, to be distributed as relics, but to 
be converted perhaps into handles for mattocks or spokes for 
wagon wheels. Too often, indeed, there seems to be a born pro- 
pensity on the part of the rising genius of our Republic to engage 
in open war with the arts, even before it has been clothed in 
breeches. No sooner does it find itself able to handle a pocket- 
knife than it is ready to employ it in whittling upon everything 
that comes in its way. Such activity might perhaps call for our 
praise if it were restricted to shingles for water-wheels or bourtree 
barrels for pop -guns, as indicating a practical mechanical taste, 
big with utilitarian promise for the future; but, unfortunately, it 
seems never to be so well satisfied as when directed, like the 
industry of those .bees called borers that penetrate our door-posts 
in summer, against w T hat is beautiful and ornamental. This spirit 
forms a distinguishing trait, it would seem, exclusively of our own 
land. Travellers tell us that no marks of it are to be met with in 
England or Germany. "Taste for the fine arts," says Mrs. 
Sigourney in her Pleasant Memories of Pleasant Lands, "forms 
an integral part of the character of the French. The very street 
beggar feels a property and a pride in the decorations of la belle 
Paris. To rifle a plant, or wound a tree, or deface a statue in the 
public squares or gardens is held by the rudest boy an indelible 
disgrace. Would that it were so every where . " 

The same want of taste which shows itself thus in outward 
things, as might be expected, is to be observed also in our morals. 
The pencilings on our public columns, besides being out of place, 



446 SELECTIONS FROM PROFESSOR NEVIN'S WRITINGS 

are devoid also of chasteness in sentiment ; and the language in 
our streets, besides being boisterous, is fraught very often with 
profaneness and ribaldry. The unfairness and violent scurrility 
of many of our political papers, and the avidity with which their 
contents are swallowed down by the people generally, show no 
taste for truth and benevolence. The frequent cases of peculation 
among our public officers, and of embezzlement among our presi- 
dents and cashiers of banks, with their consequent flight to Texas, 
or some other asylum for the oppressed, to say the least of them, 
show no taste for honesty and uprightness ; and the riots in our 
cities, and the readiness exhibited by so many everywhere to carry 
out the decrees of Judge Lynch, show, we all must admit, a want 
of right feeling as it regards justice and humanity, amounting to 
Vandalism itself. It ma}^ be insinuated perhaps that such cases 
are confined to the rabble, and a few fallen outcasts besides, while 
the main body of our people are uncontaminated. But when, in 
some of our States, we see the citizens, in elevating their candi- 
dates to office, to be wholly actuated, not by patriotic but 
selfish motives; and when, in their legislative halls, it is deemed 
even necessary sometimes that the question should be mooted by 
their representatives whether or not they ought to pay their just 
debts, to which, setting honesty and justice aside, one would think 
mere policy could return but one answer ; it tells that something 
wrong has reached the very vitals of those States . No wonder then 
that monarchists, ever ready to find fault with republics, instead of 
allowing brother Jonathan, the beau ideal of our nation, to be an 
upright, honorable gentleman, should represent him as a low, 
sneaking fellow of the baser sort, peering, as he walks abroad, 
from beneath his slouched hat, with a sharp, cunning eye, to be 
sure, but having withal a sinister expression, being incapacitated 
by selfishness for seeing anything great or beautiful around him ; 
chuckling at his own trickeries, and, while bringing down his 
hand to his pocket with a slap, exclaiming to himself, like Love- 
gold in the Play : ' ' All's well hitherto. My dear money's safe ! ' ' 
This, to be sure, smacks of caricature. Still we must confess that 
our country, with all her redeeming qualities, shows in many ways 
a vitiated taste. The correction of this, therefore, should claim 
her most serious attention. By improving herself in this respect 
she will not only secure a fairer fame abroad, but advance her own 
substantial happiness at home at the same time. 

Though for the accomplishment of this worthy object much is 



NATIONAL TASTE 447 

to be expected in the end from national liberality, the work mnst 
be commenced by families and individuals. As the evil has 
reached the youth of our country, with them the reformation 
should be undertaken. A thousand things have been written in 
favor of early moral and religious training, and a thousand 
other examples, to show its glorious results in after-life, have been 
adduced, from General Washington downwards ; yet, after all, 
few persons nowadays are disposed to carry it out thoroughly into 
practice. Many, indeed, seem to think that family government is 
a little too monarchical in its form, for a pure, republican country ; 
and, therefore, without imposing its restrictions on their sons, they 
permit them to wander abroad on the streets, independently, that 
they may, in this way qualify themselves for holding their own 
and catch up also a proper knowledge of the world. In the winter 
they may send them to school, it is true, for taking in some read- 
ing, writing and arithmetic, as these are essential in the way of 
helps to business ; but they neglect their moral teaching at home. 
Now all the virtues that adorn and bind together society or the 
State must first have adorned and bound together the family 
circle. Should the training of these be neglected by the parental 
hand at home, they will never come to anything in after-life. 
Even patriotism, around which cluster so many virtues, starts not 
up amidst party strife or political conventions. It is oftener 
smothered in these hot-beds of excitement. It must first have 
thrown forth its young feelers in the old homestead. It is noth- 
ing more than the domestic affections expanded. It is not well 
then, as often now advised, that the lad should be cast soon abroad 
on the world, for the purpose of making money for himself; ere 
his character has been shaped at home ; ere the twig has been 
bent in a proper direction. It may make him shrewd, it is true, 
but setting aside the temptations to vice into which he will be 
thrown, it will have a bad effect on his sympathies. Instead of 
feeling himself to be part of the organism of society, he will be 
apt to stand aloof on his own selfishness. His country and him- 
self he will think to be two opposite parties playing with each 
other for gain ; and ever on the watch, like a Boniface spider from 
his den of dry lodgings, to catch and keep all that he can, will 
become the grand object of his life. 

Early moral or religious training, therefore, is the first requisite 
for improving our national character. Of itself, however, it is not 
sufficient, it must be accompanied soon, and supported afterward, 



448 SELECTIONS FROM PROFESSOR NEVIN'S WRITINGS 

by that which is intellectual. The vine must always be upheld 
by the elm or some other prop ; otherwise it will become grovel- 
ing and remain fruitless. It is a prevailing fault with the youth 
of our land that they are mostly disposed to rush too soon into 
business without sufficient preparatory study. From this it has 
resulted that waywardness, impatience, and want of persevering 
habits have become characteristic traits of our countrymen. To 
some extent this disposition is shown among those who enter into 
the mechanical employments, but to a much greater, in proportion, 
as in their case more is required, among those who lay hold of the 
learned professions. Many seem to think that machines for sav- 
ing time and labor can be applied not only to physical, but also 
mental operations. It was Buler, I think, that said there is no 
royal road to mathematics, but some persons nowadays have dis- 
covered that to become great and learned, it is not just absolutely 
necessary to study mathematics at all ; and as for the Ancient 
Languages, they are not only useless but demoralizing. The hill 
of science, for what they know, may afford some "goodly pros- 
pects ' ' to those who take the trouble of clambering to its top ; 
but as, in these days of improvement, a good railroad has been 
constructed round the base, on which the journey is accomplished, 
in less than a fourth part of the time, by cars provided with every 
accommodation, they consider it much preferable to spring at once 
into one of these, and so whirl away incontinently into the land 
of usefulness and profit. Colleges and Seminaries are, in their 
opinion, dilapidated castles, or out-of-the-way caravansaries, that 
stand somewhere on that old, rugged road, that leads over the 
mountain, in whose neighborhood, to be sure, some dreamy youths 
may gather flowers and fossils, or drink from the fountains that 
are said to ooze from beneath the rocks; but, as for themselves, 
they choose rather to take a quick passage round the base. 

Now, if anything is needed for our moral improvement, it is 
that our colleges, instead of being lowered with respect to learn- 
ing, should be placed on more elevated ground. The studies pur- 
sued to some extent in these institutions, besides being applicable, 
in part, to practice in after-life, and, aside from the industrious 
mental habits which they secure, are a.dapted, above all things, to 
improve the taste and judgment. To Ethics, Mathematics and 
Natural Science, most persons, to be sure, whatever may be their 
practice, are disposed to allow this power; but to many there 
seems to be but small wisdom in the attention that is required to 



NATIONAL TASTE 449 

the ancient classics, so far, at least, as any practical interest is 
concerned. These, they feel confident, have been thrown quite 
into the rear by the march of modern improvements. Now, as 
it regards physical interests, this judgment may not be altogether 
in the wrong ; but this is to take a most narrow view of the whole 
subject. That which gives the classics their chief value, and 
makes them especially suitable to our wants at the present time, 
is the consideration that, although ages have swept over them 
since their production, they have not wilted a leaf in their human- 
ity. The old Romans, by turning their attention to Grecian liter- 
ature, were softened down in their rude manners, till at length the 
mantle of inspiration, dropping from the shoulders of the elder 
nation, rested on those of her follower. It may not be desirable 
that our country should ever copy as closely after any people, as 
was done in this case by the scholars of Rome in their servile 
admiration of Greece ; but we should lose nothing certainly, if 
our communion with the soul of classic learning were carried a 
great deal farther than it has ever yet gone. The philosophy of 
Plato, on account of its spirituality, has a stronger affinity for 
gospel truth than that of Bacon, Locke or Jeremy Bentham ; and 
the poetry and oratory of a nation, whose imagination and affec- 
tions were in the most vigorous exercise, are well deserving of the 
study of such a people as ourselves, who, it must be admitted, are 
deplorably defective in these very attributes ; that, if possible, the 
power of their life may be felt in the way of antidote and cure for 
so great an evil. 

Who is not touched with the simple description of the Cotter's 
Saturday Night of Burns, when the bairns, after having been sep- 
arated through the week "at service out amang the farmers 
roun'," are all permitted to assemble again around that trysting- 
place of the affections, their father's ingleside? By that happy 
custom being kept up, though compelled by poverty to labor 
apart through the week, their affections are still preserved fresh 
and vigorous ; and the ' ' admonition due ' ' with which the gude- 
man seasons their merriment, though from their "sair-won penny 
fee," one might think that they would all be very apt to place a 
high estimate on money, is nevertheless not drawn from such 
maxims as one might meet with in Poor Richard's Almanac, 
which, though good enough in their way, set up perhaps too often 
the acquisition of wealth as the grand incentive to industry and 
virtue, but rather from ' ' the big ha '-bible, ance his father's pride. ' ' 
3o 



450 SELECTIONS FROM PROFESSOR NEVIN'S WRITINGS 

The whole scene receives its beauty and highest happiness from 
the presence of religion; and the poet's exclamation on the occa- 
sion is replete with truth and sound philosophy : 

From scenes like these old Scotia's grandeur springs, 
That makes her loved at home, revered abroad. 

Indeed it is because such scenes are common in Scotland ; because 
early moral instruction is inculcated not only in her cottages but 
in her castles, and because the course of instruction in her uni- 
versities is thorough and complete, that on all trying occasions 
her character has stood forth so preeminently great. Her people 
are endowed with virtuous sentiments, and they are not wanting 
in learned men to defend them. When, therefore, they are called 
upon practically to make choice between God and Mammon ; 
between the comfort of a good conscience and the comfort of 
wealth; between heavenly hopes and earthly honors ; they are at 
no loss about the manner. Conscious of the worth of truth, they 
choose its vantage ground, though at the expense of their lives or 
their livings ; as exemplified in former times by the death of many 
a martyr amongst them, and lately by that spectacle of moral sub- 
limity, which is even yet attracting the gaze of reflecting Chris- 
tendom — the secession of the Free Kirk of Scotland. 

Considering then the power of education to promote a country's 
weal and worth, I cannot help reverting again to the pleasant 
ceremonies in which we have this day been engaged. While by 
the mass the only way conceived of showing their patriotism is by 
attending conventions, bearing fantastic banners, whooping, sing- 
ing and hearing political speeches, it is indeed refreshing, gentle- 
men, to see you coming forward in this quiet, unobtrusive and 
most tasteful manner, to do your country the greatest service. 
That man who has caused two blades of grass to spring where but 
one had sprung before, is said to deserve well of his nation, and 
so indeed he does ; but how much more deserving is he who has 
done the least thing whatever towards her intellectual or moral 
advancement! The literary societies of a college, it cannot be 
denied, are of more account, in some respects, in preparing its 
students for active life, than even its laboratories and lecture 
rooms. Such a society, if it offer the advantages of a good library, 
and in addition to this, as is the case with your own, the oppor- 
tunities of a well selected, constantly extending cabinet, cannot 
fail to create and cherish a taste for literature and science. By 
means of its weekly sittings, moreover, through the help of 



NATIONAL TASTE 451 

friendly criticism and the excitement of honest emulation, the 
capacities and resources of the members, as you are well aware, 
are elicited in the most favorable way ; while the parliamentary 
style in which its proceedings in debating, oratory, and composi- 
tion, are conducted, forms an admirable preparation, as you will 
understand hereafter more fully perhaps than you do now, for the 
part they are to act in the end in the grand drama of life. It is 
not seemly then that they should be secreted in the main building 
of a college edifice. They deserve to appear publicly in tasteful 
buildings of their own, like daughters, to say the least, on each 
side of their Alma Mater. 

The rising of this and other structures sacred to taste and let- 
ters, and indications in other ways exhibited of a growing inter- 
est beginning to be felt throughout our country, are the happiest 
prognostics in her history. From such manifestations we fondly 
infer that the winter of ignorance and prejudice, which has held 
its reign so long in certain quarters, is giving way at length to a 
joyous spring of right feeling and good taste; and that this will 
be followed in due order by a glorious summer of all excellent 
spiritual fruits. With such animating prospects before us this 
day, we feel disposed to contemplate the Corner-Stonk of your 
new hall, which has now been solemnly committed to its place, 
with feelings similar to those of Henry Kirke White towards the 
early primrose, and exclaim with him : 

Thee, when young Spring first questioned Winter's sway, 
And dared the sturdy blusterer to the fight, 
Thee on this bank he threw, 
To mark his victory. 

It is from the presence of indications like these we cherish the 
hope, that while the physical resources of our country continue to 
be developed, the mines of her moral wealth, as they lie deep 
imbedded in the imagination and heart of the people, will not be 
suffered to remain neglected. Our trust is rather that by a proper 
attention given to the claims of education she will be prepared 
in due time, to take her position among the nations of the earth, 
with all her capabilities unfolded in full harmonious proportion, 
as not only the most shrewd and enterprising, but the greatest, 
best and most happy also among them all. 



452 SELECTIONS FROM PROFESSOR NEVIN'S WRITINGS 

§ 182. Colloquy, No. i — The Farmer 's Mistake. 

Written for the tenth anniversary of the Diagnothian Literary Society of 
Marshall College, at Mercersburg, Pa., fuly 4, 1843, by Prof W. M. 
Nevin. Spoken by Thomas N. Kennedy o?i the part of the " Student " 
and C. B. Campbell on the part of the "Farmer." 

(Student rises and bows, as if about to address the audience.) 

Solomon Broadhead (from below the stage). — Hillo, my young 
chap ! Your steps here are a leetle too steep for me, and racklety 
besides. You must give us a helpin' hand. 

Student. — With pleasure, my good Sir, if you desire it, but I 
would think you would find a more convenient seat a few pews in 
front. 

Solomo?i. — In front ! Naw, naw. I must get up on this scaffold. 
I may as well do that at once as be histed up afterwards by the 
people. My name is Solomon Broadhead, you must know. It's 
nearly impossible for a meeting to get over without having some 
remarks from me. Here (he is helped upon the stage) that's 
a cliver feller. I'll do the same for you some time. Well, now 
this is a very large and respectable meeting from Montgomery and 
Peters Townships — a great public rejoicing, I reckon. 

Student. — Yes, we have had something of the sort, Mr. Broad- 
head, but you have arrived a little too late. The performance is 
all over. 

Solomon. — All over, is it! Well, now, I'm sorry for that. Yet 
somehow it often happens that I get in a leetle too late for the 
loaves and fishes. But to-day I was over at Campbellstown, and 
you know it ain't possible for me to be in two places at once. We 
had a great rejoicing there, too, and it was well nigh on to night 
afore we finished our proceedings. I was on my way home and 
had came to your town here, when I beheld them lights and 
heered the music, and so I concluded I'd get off my horse and 
hitch him up by the fence outside there, and come in and see what 
you was doing in here, anyhow. 

Student. — Doing ! Oh, we have been doing wonders, Mr. 
Broadhead. We have been celebrating the day as it ought to be 
celebrated. We have just been participating in a literary feast. 

Solomo?i. — A feast, was it? Well, that's right enough: that's 
what I call a celebrating the day as it ought to be. I go in for 
eating and drinking. If that ain't the right way for showing off 
our freedom and independence, I would like to know what is, 



the farmer's mistake 453 

unless, may be, firing cannon. We had a great dale of celebrat- 
ing over at Campbellstown, too, but I ain't so far done over yet 
but what I could jine in with my friends in Messersburg. But 
I'm the "day after the fair," you tell me. Your eatables are all 
consumed. Well, I don't wonder at it when I look at the large- 
ness of this meeting. It must have called for a tarrible sight of 
cakes to go round you all. But where is your crumbs or heel- 
taps or broken tumblers ? Why I see no leavings whatsomever ; 
and you all look so parfectly sober. Raly, if you hadn't told me 
I would not have suspected you had been eating at all. 

Student. — Bating ! Oh, no, we have not been eating in the literal 
sense of the word, Mr. Broadhead. We have been partaking of 
a literary entertainment : a feast of reason and a flow of soul. 
Not our palates, but our tastes and imaginations have been grati- 
fied. In short, we have just been witnessing an exhibition of the 
Diagnothian Literary Society. 

Solomon. — An exhibition, was it? Oh ho! Well, that's better. 
I go in for exhibitions of societies, too. They are encouraging to 
our agricultures and manufactories. I would be no true Repub- 
lican, if I didn't. Some of your things are laid by, I reckon ; yet, 
considering what's remaining, you must have had a very large 
exhibition here this evening. Them folks, a sitting round here 
behind us, some with ribbons on, and one or two with specs, were 
the judges, were'nt they, that determined who took the prizes? 

Student. — Prizes! Oh, no, sir; there were no prizes awarded, 
and of course no judges appointed. Some of the productions, to 
be sure, were well deserving of such a distinction ; but the fixing 
of the scale of merits has been left wholly to the good taste of 
those who witnessed the exhibition, and, no doubt, different per- 
sons will decide differently. 

Solomon. — Well, it was always my notion that exhibitions should 
have prizes. The largest one I was ever at afore was in Cham- 
bersburg, a great many years ago. They called it the Exhibition 
of the Franklin County Agricultural Society, and it was raly worth 
seeing. They were well worth seeing. There was some remark- 
able demonstrations there of American produce. They were well 
worth looking at, just for themselves; but it did my heart good, 
besides, to see the fellers that raised them getting prizes. 

Student. — Prizes are to be recommended on some occasions, 
Mr. Broadhead, but on others they are not. The announcement 
of them in public creates sometimes an over-excitement. 



454 SELECTIONS FROM PROFESSOR NEVIN'S WRITINGS 

Solomon. — Well, that may be. Folks when they are over- 
excited, too, get unstiddy and narvous, and they can't do as well 
as they might otherwise. I seed a case of that at that exhibition. 
There was about half a dozen of ploughers all in one field, and 
every one had a land for himself. Nat Nethercoat was one of 
them. Perhaps you know Nat : his farm jist adjines mine. Well, 
Nat didn't get excited at' all. The rest was all most tarribly 
skeered about who would beet, and they began to swear and pelt 
their horses to make them go faster, and they kept looken over at 
one another, to see who was the foremost. They mistook it some- 
how for a race ; but Nat knowed what it was ; and so he walked 
along after his plough as unconsarned, as if it was his own far-back 
field he was in, and no person obsarving him but the cows. He 
made no remarks whatsomever to no one, only ' ' Gee wha, Buck, ' ' 
to his horses, and all the others got done afore him, that's sartain, 
but still he was through in the appointed time, and his ploughing 
was by far the best, as any one could see with half an eye, and so 
he took the prizes. 

Student. — And so he ought, Mr. Broadhead. ' ' Slow and Sure ' * 
is a motto that ought to be adopted by not only our Agricultural 
but our Literary Societies. In the fields of Literature among our 
young adventurers there is often too great a hurrying and skim- 
ming over the surface of affairs ; and it is only now and then we 
meet with some cool, plodding fellow, like Nat, that enters into 
his subject deeply, and throws over his furrows handsomely, as 
you might say, and such will be most likely to succeed in the 
world. 

Solomon. — Them's good remarks, my young chap. "Speed the 
plough ' ' ain't always the best rule. Ah, there's no mistake about 
our neighbor Nat. He's got a straight eye in his head; and he 
knows how to break up follers. But, by the by, you ought to 
have been at that exhibition to have seed some of the cattle. 
There was a Barkshire pig there that was only eight months old 
that weighed somewhere about three hundred and fifty pounds ; 
and, besides, there was two or three of the most astonishingest 
large cows of the Devonshire breed there that I ever laid my eyes 
on in all my born days. 

Student. — Still, Mr. Broadhead, you cannot suppose that our 
exhibition was anything of that sort. You surely cannot see any- 
thing in this assembly to remind you of ploughing or Devonshire 
cattle. 



the farmer's mistake 455 

Solomon. — Naw, naw : they hold them sort of shows always out 
of doors. This here exhibition is not of tame animals or wild ani- 
mals, niether : for I see you have no elephants, nor lions, nor mon- 
keys, nor any larnt pig this evening. The fact is, I am not sartain 
about the object of this meeting. When I first looked around I was 
sure itw T as a manufactory exhibition you was holding, where they 
show off all kinds of cloth and ribbons, and sich articles that are 
of rale American make; but it don't look just quite enough like 
a store for that, and so then I allowed it must be a Harticultural 
exhibition. I think they call them so where they exhibit all 
kinds of garden produce ; but then I must be out again , for you 
hain't got quite enough crocks full of bushes and posies here for 
that niether. I see a great many ribbons and flowers here, that's 
sartain; but then it's all spread over the heads and shoulders of 
the women. I reckon you wouldn't mean to assert that all them 
ribbons and bonnets and roses what them women are exhibiting, 
are all of the rale American growth and manufactory, and nothing 
fureign nor borrowed about them whatsomever. 

Student. — Well, I cannot speak with certainty of the bonnets, 
Mr. Broadhead, but of this I am sure that the faces under them 
are all of American growth : there is nothing foreign nor borrowed 
about them. But you have wholly mistaken the object of our 
exhibition. The ladies and gentlemen before us have come, not 
to exhibit themselves, but to witness the exhibition of others. 
They have been not actors, but auditors, on this occasion. The 
gentlemen behind us, whom you mistook for judges, have been 
the real performers. They have just finished delivering us some 
excellent speeches. 

Solomon. — Speeches, do you say? Well now, that's what was 
running in my head all along. I thought it was speechifying you 
were at here this evening ; but then you got to talking to me 
about feasts, exhibitions and Societies, and you put me all out. I 
never was used to hear speech -making meetings called by them 
names afore. In our neighborhood we mostly call them conven- 
tions. Another thing that confounded me a little was to see so 
many women here. I often heered them singing political songs 
at the Harrison campaign at we used to call it ; but then I never 
seed so many turned out to a Whig, nor Loco-Foco Convention 
niether. 

Stude?it. — You do not then approve of our ladies attending con- 
ventions ? 



456 SELECTIONS FROM PROFESSOR NEVIN'S WRITINGS 

Solomon. — Approve? Yes, I do. I am the advocate of that 
sex. They are the mothers of our sons — the bones and sinners of 
the land. I say they should be born free and equal as ourselves. 
They should go to our Legislators. They should be sent to our 
Congress Halls. They should be made the chief magistrates of 
these United States. They should speechify in public. I rejoice 
this day to see so many women of that sex coming out to our 
conventions. 

Student. — Why, you grow eloquent on the occasion? 

Solo?non. — Eloquent! I always grow eloquent when I get a 
standing up before my friends and feller-citizens. It brings to 
mind the good old times of 1840, when log-cabins were a building, 
and the poles were a raising, and the flags were a flapping in the 
breeze, and the balls were a rolling for "Tippacanoe and Tyler, 
too." Them was the times for speechifying and conventions. I 
got up once myself and made a flaming speech, and you never 
heered what a stamping and shouting and hurra wing there was. 
Well, every time they seed me coming to the meetings after that 
afore I got among them, you would hear them bawling out as loud 
as they could, "Solomon Broadhead ! a speech from Solomon 
Broadhead!" And then there was no backing out. If I couldn't 
get up just at once, they would hist me up on the scaffold: so 
that afterwhile it got as natteral for me to get up, a 'most as for an 
ox to go into his stall : and so that was the reason I got up here 
this evening: 'cause I knowed this was a convention. 

Student. — We hope then, as you have risen with that intention, 
Mr. Broadhead, you will favor us with a speech. The patience of 
this audience, to be sure, must be nearly exhausted, having already 
listened to a Prologue and six orations this evening, but we trust 
they will still be gratified to have a few concluding remarks from 
you, Mr. Solomon Broadhead. 

Solomon. — Well, I wouldn't care to thunder them out my old 
speech again that I used to speak in 1840. It carried me through 
that campaign, and if I altered some of the varbage and names a 
little, I suspect it might do for this. But, afore setting out off, I 
would like to know something about the politics of this conven- 
tion. I can get over a meeting pretty well that's all of the same 
politics as my own, but I find it's a tarrible hard job for me to 
speechify to one that's on the wrong side of politics, especially if 
they find me out . Then you don ' t hear the people hurra wing at you , 
and taking off their hats and hollering: "Go ahead, Solomon!" 



THE farmer's mistake 457 

but instead of that you hear them bawling out : ' ' Pull him down ! 
Pull him down ! ' ' and they are very apt to hit you with a rotten 
egg or something worse. I never tried it but once myself, and I 
hope I never may again. It's worse than getting rowed up Salt 
River. So, jist afore setting off, I'd like to know, in the first 
place, if this is a Clay meeting or a Buchanan meeting. 

Stude7it. — Neither, my dear sir. As I said before, this not a 
political but a literary meeting. We have just been celebrating 
the Tenth Anniversary of the Diagnothian Literary Society of 
Marshall College. 

Solomon. — Marshall College! Well now, why didn't you tell 
me that afore, and why didn't I find it out myself considering the 
Siminary is in this very town ? But who on earth would dream 
of College folks celebrating the Fourth of July ! I would as soon 
suspect the British for doing that. I always thought you had 
your Commencements in the Fall. I never heered tell of any 
folks a celebrating the Fourth except patriots and republicans. 

Student. — You do not think it possible then for students to be 
patriots and republicans? 

Solomon. — Students to be patriots and republicans ! Naw, naw. 
That would be a feenominy indeed. It's pracious little students 
care about the good of this country. 

Student. — The Founders of this Society were of a different 
opinion, Mr. Broadhead. They supposed literature and republi- 
canism to be not incompatible. Indeed they thought they were 
mutually sustainers of each other, and that as Letters nourished 
best under a republican form of government, so also our freedom 
can be preserved only by their cultivation. Therefore, in framing 
the Constitution of our Society they resolved that its anniversary 
should always be celebrated on the same day with that of our 
National Independence. 

Solomo7i. — They resolved, did they ? Well, I don't know much 
about your founders or Society, but I think I know a little about 
resolving anyhow. We had a very large and respectable meeting 
of the citizens of our township last winter, and then we had a 
good dale of resolving, too. It was a meeting for instructing our 
Ligislators how to vote, and to cut off the drains, as we called 
them. Well, after a good dale of speechifying, and discussing 
of the affairs of the State, and the ruination of our country, at last 
we came to the conclusion of resolving unanimously ; and so, 
among other things, we resolved, and had it published in the 



458 SELECTIONS FROM PROFESSOR NEVIN'S WRITINGS 

newspapers, that them Colleges were nuisances of the land, the 
nurseries of the purse-proud scions of bloated aristocracy, and 
it was'nt right for the poor to pay for schooling the rich. And I 
reckon you know, my young chap, that what is once resolved on 
by a large and rispectable meeting of citizens of a township, 
and published in a newspaper, must be true. 

Student. — It does not become me to say anything to the reso- 
lutions of a large and respectable meeting of the citizens of a 
whole township, Mr. Broadhead, yet I cannot help thinking they 
mistook the object of our Colleges. Taxation being in proportion 
to the amount of property possessed, I would think that they 
might have said with greater propriety that the rich were taxed 
for the schooling of the poor. The rich have no peculiar per- 
sonal interest that I can see in having Colleges sustained. They 
possess the means of sending their sons abroad to be educated, 
and these, from their having great expectations, are not so apt to 
improve their present opportunities and prepare themselves for 
being useful in the world. A wise State is then more likely to 
look to the poor, or, at any rate, to the middle classes of society 
for her most enterprising sons. It has, therefore, generally been 
the policy of such to endow as far as possible her own Literary 
Institutions, so that being provided with suitable buildings and 
the best instructors and apparatus, they may, at the same time, be 
not above the reach of the talented of her commonality. As a 
proof of this, if you look around on the most influential men, in 
the Church or State, you will mostly find them to be those whose 
parents were limited in their circumstances, but whom private 
bounty, or the liberality of their government to her institutions , 
permitted to reach the benefits of a classical education. 

Solomon. — Well, these arguments are very good, my young 
chap, if they was only to the right side of the question, but being 
as they are on the opposite side, they won't go down with the 
people. If you ever to get into the Legislator, or any other office 
of State, when you get old enough, you had better give up for 
arguing for Colleges and aristocracy. 

Student. — Why, Mr. Broadhead, if by aristocracy you mean that 
of wealth or birth, you must allow, I think, that the pride of each 
is not to be attributed to Colleges ; and of what other influence 
they may be accused of training, I cannot well conceive, unless it 
be that of intelligent and useful citizens. But such an aristocracy 
is not so much to be depreciated. They are not the nuisances 



CAPTAIN WOODBERRY 459 

Solomon. — Well, well, my young chap, them remarks is all good 
enough, but if you mean to speak on , you had better say it off to this 
meeting, and not to me. I must be jogging on homeward, for its 
getting most tarrible late. I have nearly ten miles to ride to-night 
yet, and our folks will be wondering what in the world's a keep- 
ing of me. Well, a good night to you all. [Exit Solomon.] 

Student. — Good night, Mr. Broadhead, and is this a fact? Are 
the people of Pennsylvania opposed to Literary Institutions? 
No, it cannot be. Though the acts of some might be thus inter- 
preted, they do not express the sense of the majority. Solomon 
Broadhead is mistaken. The resolutions of a few noisy meet- 
ings, excited by the harangues of some office-seeking demagogues, 
are not to be regarded as the true voice of the people. True it is, 
our Legislature, last winter, withdrew from our Colleges the appro- 
priation it had settled on them for a term of years ; but this act 
of repudiation is attributed, not so much to any wish on its part 
to discourage learning, we are told, as to the deep debt in which 
our State is involved. No. The Schoolmaster is abroad. A 
warmer zeal for education is being felt all over the land. We 
know it by the tone of our most respectable public prints. 
It shows itself in the liberal donations of many to our different 
Literary Institutions. It is felt by ourselves in the handsome con- 
tributions, to our own and her Sister Society, for the erection of 
our Literary Halls, which will soon go up and be an ornament to 
Mercersburg. With such palpable manifestations of regard, and 
while our annual celebrations are graced with audiences so bright 
and intelligent as the present, we cannot think that learning is 
disregarded in our land : we cannot feel discouraged ourselves, 
but sustained by the worthiness of our cause, and the heart-felt 
plaudits of the wise and good, we go from year to year rejoicing. 
[Exit Student.] 

§ 183. Colloquy, No. 2 — Captaiji Woodberry . 
Written for the Anniversary Celebration of the D. L. Society , July 4, 1845, 
by Prof Wm. M. Nevin. Spoken by Mr. foshua H. Derr on the part 
of Captain Woodberry, by Mr. Geo. S. Kemble on the part of Reuben, 
and by Mr. R. S. Brownson on that of Moses. The stage was erected 
out in the forest, south of Mercersburg. 

Captain Woodberry . — As there seems to be nothing doin' just 
at present, if no parson has no objections I'll get up on to your 
stage, gentlemen, as I want to look over this congregation. 

Reuben. — Ha! Captain Woodberry, how do you do? I am glad 
to see you. 



460 SELECTIONS FROM PROFESSOR NEVIN'S WRITINGS 

Captain W. — What ! Reuben is that you ? Here give us your 
hand. (He is helped up on the stage). I jist want to look over 
this congregation to see if I kin see anything of my two daughters, 
Margery and Tabitha. The machine is visible for them on the 
outside of the woods. I think it is high time that we should be 
goin' home. 

Reuben. — You had better wait a few minutes, Capt. Woodberry. 
Take a seat, if you please (offering him a chair). The perform- 
ances are almost over. We have nothing now to come off but 
the Colloquy and some music. 

Captain W. — No, no, Reuben. I don't care nothing about the 
collikies and music. I have been waitin' here till I can't wait no 
longer. I must be off as soon as I can sit my eyes on my daugh- 
ters. Now, raly, I thought I could have knowed their bonnets 
by the posies unde'r them, and the white ruffles hingin' down 
afore ; Tabitha had a lilac on her bonnet, and Margery had a par- 
asol, that wasn't much bigger nor a May-apple or a sun-flower; 
but here I obsarve a great many just as like them as they kin be, 
but they ain't them niether. 

Reuben. — Though unable to recognize your daughters, Captain, 
I have no doubt they can recognize you ; though I suppose that 
at present they feel a little diffident about rising and showing 
themselves before so many people. Be patient, therefore, for a 
few minutes, if you please; and when the performances are over, 
they will certainly come forward and commit themselves to your 
care. 

Captain W. — No, no, Reuben; we must be off as soon as we 
kin, 'cause there's no use to be stayin' here inny longer. We've 
heered enough of your speakin', and we've a good piece to go 
home. 

Reuben. — And, pray, how did you lose sight of your daughters? 

Captain W. — Lose sight of my daughters? Why, you see, they 
would walk into town this mornin' to see the lay in' of your 
Corner-Stone by themselves, 'cause none of us folks could come, 
being as it is harvest times, and we hain't got time to be runnin' 
after such nonsense. But after dinner Moses and me hitched up 
the machine and driv into town to fetch them home, and I left 
Moses behind the brick pile, mindin' the horses, 'cause Ball won't 
stand quiet, being as the flies is most tarrible bad. 

Reuben. — We feel gratified at the compliment paid us by your 
daughters, Capt. Woodberry. It was a long distance for them to 



CAPTAIN WOODBKRRY 461 

walk this morning, however. They must be true Diaguothians, 
and though business prevented your coming earlier, I feel confident 
that your heart was with us . Though the times may be very busy 
with you at home, I cannot help thinking that hereafter should 
we stand in need, you would not withhold from us a helping hand. 

Captain W. — A helpin' hand! Why, my patience! Hain't you 
got that Corner-Stone fixed yet, that you want more helpin' hands ? 
Why, I've seed a whole raisin' put up with a great dale less hands 
than you must a had helpin' you here to-day. 

Reuben. — O yes, the Corner-Stone is laid well enough, but some- 
thing still is wanting to complete the superstructure. We do not 
wish you to perform any manual labor, to be sure, but men of 
your wealth, you know, can do a great deal m another way — with- 
out any lifting or labor at all. I think you perceive what I would 
be at, Captain. 

Captain W. — What you would be at? Yes! I think I do. I 
think I parceive what you would be at parfectly, young man ; you 
would be at putting your hand into my pocket, you young rascal, 
you! 

Reuben. — Oh, no, by no means. I would be merely inducing 
you to put your own hand into your own pocket. Certainly, 
Captain, you are a warm friend of our Institutions, considering, 
if nothing more, the benefits they confer on the neighborhood. 

Captain IV. — Benefits they confar on the neighborhood? Well, 
I would jist like to know what them benefits is that they confar 
on the neighborhood, 'cause I don't know. 

Reuben. — If none other, the coming together of so many students 
must bring some money into the neighborhood. 

Captain W. — Well, if they do, it's pracious little that I ever saw 
of it, I can tell you, Reuben. 

Reuben. — You may not receive it from their own hands, but 
certainly you get some of it in the way of marketing and the like 
from their boarding-houses. 

Captain W. — Well, may be I do get a little in that way for 
ingens and taters and other sich things for sass; but them ain't 
the things what makes us farmers rich. It's the flour what we 
send to Baltimore ! 

Reuben. — Then if your purse be not advantaged in this way, I 
think your family must be. 

Captain W. — That my family must be ! Well, if they must be, 
it's not obsarvable to my eyes, inny way. I wonder what advan- 



462 SELECTIONS FROM PROFESSOR NEVIN'S WRITINGS 

tage it is to my family for my daughters to be fixin' up at their 
bonnets and frocks for two whole weeks afore comin' in to see the 
layin' of your Corner-Stone, and leavin' their poor mother at 
home to do all the work. I wonder what advantage there is in 
all that ! 

Reuben. — I do not mean your daughters, Captain, but your 
sons. I would think it would be an advantage to your sons to 
have the means of education within their reach. 

Captain W. — Oh, it's Moses you mean, is it? And it's jist you 
and sich fellows that puts them notions into Moses's head about 
leavin' the farm, and comin' in here to rub his back against the 
College, so that he has no heart for ploughin' inny more. I don't 
care nothin' about sich advantages. I wish them advantages was 
in Guinea. 

Reuben. — Well, it would be a fine thing for that country I 
have no doubt, provided the people there would appreciate the 
blessings. But if you cannot allow that our Institutions are of 
any advantage to your farm and family, you must admit that they 
are of some advantage to the State. 

Captain W. — Yes, I admit that they are ; for to get it into debt 
over head and ears, and make us pay most dreadful heavy taxes. 
A purty advantage that is, Reuben. You should read the news- 
papers, and then you'd know it was your Colleges and Sime- 
naries that helped to get our State so terribly into debt, so that 
our public works had almost to be sold by the Sheriff; and it's 
only since the State quit paying them out inny more money that 
its gitten' out of debt. 

Reuben. — You are certainly mistaken about the cause, Captain. 
But since the State has withdrawn its appropriations from Colleges 
and Seminaries, it becomes liberal-hearted men, like yourself, to 
step forward towards their relief and support. I always took you 
to be a true patriot, Captain Woodberry. 

Captain W. — Well, you was right in that, Reuben. I always 
was a true patriot, and a democratic -republican ; and no man 
ever saw me behind-hand in saving my country. When I was 
livin' down in your father's sittlement, I was one of them that 
marched down to Baltimore to drive away the British ; and after 
I moved up to this here sittlement I was made a Captain of the 
militia. And I can tell you what, Reuben, the militia was another 
thing then from what it is now, 'cause no corn-stalks was allowed, 
and a good minny of them had guns. And last summer I was 



CAPTAIN WOODBERRY 463 

marshal of the delegation that went from our sittlement to the 
great conventions that was held in Chambersburg, Hagerstown 
and Greencastle ; and besides that, I giv something handsome 
for the raisin' of several poles. 

Reuben. — Then you will certainly give us something still more 
handsome for the raising of our Halls ; for of whatever advantage 
militia trainings and political conventions may be, you must admit 
that Halls and Colleges are of greater. 

Captain W. — Now, that's jist where you and me differs, young 
man. The militia and conventions is of greater sarvice to our 
country; but Simenaries and Colleges is of no sarvice whatsom- 
ever. How long is it, innyhow, that you stay in one of them 
Colleges afore you get through? 

Reuben. — At furthest, six or seven; or, at least, three or four 
years. 

Captain W. — Well, after you have staid here six or seven, or 
three or four years, what is it after all that you come out to be? 

Reuben. — We come out to be Bachelors of Arts. 

Captai?i W. — Bachelors of Fiddlesticks ! Them's the very 
worst things you could come out to be. We don't want inny 
more bachelors in our country. We have too many bachelors 
already in our country. It would be a dale better for our young 
men that's here, if you would go out to the backwoods and cut 
down some trees, and build up some cabins, and clear the way for 
gittin' married, instead of stayin' here so many years, doin' 
nothin', and then comin' out to be nothin' but bachelors. 

Reuben. — You mistake the term, Captain. It is not Bachelors, 
I mean, as opposed to Benedicts '. We are not a fraternity of 
monks. Our students have no very serious objections to getting 
married, provided circumstances would admit. Indeed, some of 
them become engaged even before leaving College ; but this, I 
think, is not advisable. In our Society, too, a great number of 
our members are married men, but these are all Honorary Mem- 
bers. 

Captai?i W. — All 'Ornery Members? You good-for-nothin ' 
feller, you ! How dare you stand up to my face and call inny- 
body "ornery! And all for no other reason but jist because they 
happen to be married ! Is them the manners that you learn at 
College, young man? To stand up and call your own father and 
mother 'ornery, for it's jist the same thing as if you sassed them- 
selves personally, Reuben, and as minny people as there is in this 



464 SELECTIONS FROM PROFESSOR NEVIN'S WRITINGS 

here congregation that's married. Ah, Reuben! Reuben! I'll 
write to your father about this. 

Reuben. — Indeed, Captain, you mistake my meaning altogether. 
By Bachelors of Arts I merely mean those students who have 
completed their Collegiate course, and taken their first degree in 
the Liberal Arts ; and if they study some profession, or attend to 
literary pursuit for three } T ears afterwards, they generally receive 
their second degree, or become Masters of Arts. 

Captain W. — Yes, I'll warrant you by that time they'll come 
out to be parfect Masters of Arts, and in ivery thing that's bad ; 
but them's not the caracters, Reuben, that we want in our country. 
We have enough of Masters of Arts and tricks, and ivery kind of 
devilments in our shops and stores and taverns, without wanting 
Colleges and Simenaries to be sending any more. 

Reuben. — You mistake the object of Colleges, Captain. They 
have no such tendency. They are calculated to improve the taste, 
honesty and all moral beauties. It is rather a thirst for money, 
created often by other pursuits, that disposes people to be mean 
and artful. 

Captain W. — Now, Reuben, don't talk to me about money 
makin' people mean and artful, and that Colleges has a contrary 
effect, 'cause if that was the case it would be observable in your 
young men that's here ; but who was it just now that wanted to 
get somethin' out of my pocket ? Kin you tell me that? 

Reuben. — If I wanted to be getting something out of your pocket, 
Captain, it was not for myself, but for our Halls. I did not crave 
your money for my private gratification, but for the public good. 
In a few years we who are sojourners on these grounds will have 
gone abroad into the world, but ere departing we wish to erect on 
them these buildings for the good of the country. 

Captain W. — Nonsense! Reuben. Don't tell me that inny 
more, 'cause I showed you jist now that you were wrong. If 
them buildin's had some steam engens or machinery in them, 
then you might say they was for the good of our country, but at 
present they hain't nothing of that sort. 

Reuben. — I have heard of institutions, Captain, where on account 
of the rapidity with which students are manufactured into gradu- 
ates it is supposed by some that steam power or machinery is 
employed, but as yet we have not found out that secret at Mercers- 
burg. 

Captain W. — Well, you should find out that secret in Mercers- 



CAPTAIN WOODBKRRY 465 

burg, as well as in inny other place, and not be botherin' people 
for money that comes in here to fetch home their daughters. 
There's no building of inny kind of use that hain't machinery in 
it, and can't make money for itself. 

Reube?i. — What then would you say of our Court-House and 
Churches? They are certainly not money-making machines. 

Captaiii W. — Well that's a sartain truth. They ain't. I have 
paid out a great dale of taxes for that new Court-House in 
Chambersburg, and ivry time I come into town there's somebody 
iverlastingly dinging at me for money for the preparations in our 
Church. But then, Reuben, them's necessary evils, 'cause we 
couldn't get along in our country without them and jails ; else the 
people would get too bad. But we could get along purty well, I 
think, without inny Colleges. 

Reuben. — If for nothing more, we need Colleges for preparing 
young men to preach in Churches and plead in Court-Houses. 

Captain W. — No, we don't want them for that, Reuben, 'cause 
it's not necessary. There's a good many lawyers in our country 
that kin tell as big stories as you kin, Reuben, and ministers, too, 
that kin preach good sarmons, and doctors, too, that kin kill or 
cure more people than iver you will, Reuben, that niver rubbed 
their backs aginst a College nor Siminary, niether. 

Moses (approaching). — Father, father, daddy! The machine is 
waitin' for you. 

Captain W. — Why, Moses, is that you? My patience ! What 
business had you to leave the machine for, 'cause you know the 
horses won't stand? Go along back, directly! Raly now, we'll 
be in a purty fix ! The machine run off and Margery and Tabitha 
both missin'. 

Moses. — No, no, father. Marg and Tabitha is both in the ma- 
chine, and they sent me round to tell you to come on, 'cause they 
want to be go in' home. 

Captain IV. — Both in the machine ! Well, raly, that's a blessin'. 

Reuben. — I am sorry, Captain, that you leave us in this mood. 
I thought you would be more favorably disposed. The Trustees 
have given us the disposal of one or two scholarships for our bene- 
fit, and I was almost certain you would have taken one of these. 

Captain W. — Me take a scholarship, and larnin' among you 
boys, for so minny years, and thin come out to be a bachelor ! 
Raly now, Reuben, that would be a purty story ! 

Reuben. — Oh, no, it would not be necessary for you to come into 
3i 



466 SELECTIONS FROM PROFESSOR NEVIN'S WRITINGS 

town or study at all. All that would be required on your part 
would be the paying over merely of five hundred dollars. 

Captain W. — Five hundred dollars ! You most impudent feller, 
you. I niver heard the like of that in my life ! Five hundred dol- 
lars, indeed ! And larnin' to be got on my head like a night cap 
without inny study at all! Ho, ho, Reuben, you needn't explain 
to me inny more. You've explained to me enough, 'cause I know 
now what you are parfectly. You're a rogue; you're a thief; 
you're a robber ; you're a pickpocket ; you're a parfect master of 
arts. There's no use to be stayin' here inny longer. Your father 
must take you home. It's not me that you want to be larnt, but 
it's my money you want to be at. Five hundred dollars, indeed 1 
Well, now, if your father don't hear of this my name is not Nicho- 
las Woodberry. [Exit Captain Woodberry.] 

Reuben. — The old gentleman has gone off in a passion, yet I 
declare, it was not my wish to offend him. He came originally 
from the neighborhood of my father, and on that account I several 
times visited him at his farm. From this I inferred that his 
benevolence was general, and that he would take an interest in 
our enterprise of the Halls, but from this day's conversation I 
I find was mistaken. He seems to be one of those whose sympa- 
thies cannot reach beyond their own property and fireside. In the 
march of improvement they feel an interest so far as it brings 
them some pecuniary advantage, but for general education they 
have no concern, not being aware that though steam power and 
machinery may contribute much to our comfort and convenience 
in life, it is only by the culture of our moral and religious nature 
that the wilderness of this world will be at length made to bud 
and blossom as the rose. [Exit Reuben.] 



From time to time Professor Nevin wrote a considerable num- 
ber of articles for the public press : first for the Friend at Pitts- 
burgh, and then subsequently for the Weekly Messenger and the 
Mercersburg Review, both published at Chambersburg, Pa., and 
other periodicals. We can here only mention the titles of a few 
of them, as follows: The Apple as a Criterion of Taste, Angling 
for Trout, Miniature Painting, Tyler's Tacitus, A Plea for Our 
Olfactories, Piitz's Ancient Geography and History, Old English 
and Scottish Ballads, Ovidius Naso Redivivus, Progress of the Art 
of Translating, Vernal Odes of Horace, The Cicadse, Latin Pronun- 



WHEN THESE TWO HAELS WERE NEW 467 

ciation, Conservatism of Colleges, Objective and Subjective Pres- 
ents, and others. These articles were all written in the Profes- 
sor's pure English style, somewhat quaint, abounding with his 
quiet humor or wit. He wrote a number of interesting shorter 
or longer poems. These are in the hands of his daughter Marie, 
who intends to publish them hereafter in a separate volume, for 
which she is well qualified. 

Some years ago the writer was preparing a small volume on 
College Reminiscences, at Mercersburg, and he applied to the 
Professor for one of his little poems, but he had none of them at 
hand. His muse, however, once more awoke, and a few hours 
afterward he handed us the following pensive lyric for our use. 
When the College was removed from Mercersburg to Lancaster 
the Halls of the two Literary Societies, erected by the energies of 
the students, were, as a matter of course, left behind to be used for 
some other purposes. It was in regard to their fate, that the Pro- 
fessor turned his tyre once more, probably for the last time. Thus 
it reads : 

§ 184. When These Two Halls Were New. 
i. 
Of my old friends, oh, are there yet 

A few remaining o'er, 
Who still look back with fond regret 

To those dear times of yore — 
To those dear times of yore, my boys, 

And bring again to view 
The gladsome sports we once enjoyed 

When these two Halls were new ; 
When these two Halls were new, my boys ; 
When these two Halls were new? 

II. 
They were our joy, they were our pride, 

Wrought through our helping hands : 
For we the ready had supplied 

Acquired from many lands- 
Acquired from many lands, my boys ; 

And when the work was through 
How glorious was our triumph then, 

To see them standing new ; 
To see them standing new, my boys ; 

To see them standing new ! 

in. 
Oh, don't you mind what joys we had 
Abroad and in each Hall, 



468 SELECTIONS FROM PROFESSOR NEVIN'S WRITINGS 

Which now it makes me rather sad 

In memory to recall — 
In mem'ry to recall, my boys, 

When hearts were warm and true, 
And we for learning burned with zeal, 

When these two Halls were new ; 
When these two Halls were new, my boys ; 

When these two Halls were new ! 

IV. 

Oh, mind ye not the vict'ries won 

In speaking and debate, 
And on the sward the jovial fun 

Which did our hearts elate — 
Which did our hearts elate, my boys ; 

Whence vigor did accrue 
To limbs alike and soul, my boys ; 

When these two Halls were new, 
When these two Halls were new, my boys ; 

When these two Halls were new ! 

v. 
Then, how we traversed every glade, 

And climbed each mountain height , 
And every wid'ning scene surveyed 

With rapturous delight — 
With rapturous delight, my boys, 

And searched each cavern through, 
And then returned, all knowledge earned — 

When these two Halls were new ; 
When these two Halls were new, my boys ; 

When these two Halls were new ! 

VI. 

How proud we were to think upon 

The deeds we would achieve, 
When would our college work be done 

And we these Halls would leave — 
And we these Halls would leave, my boys, 

Our callings to pursue ; 
But who e'er reached those hopes conceived 

When these two Halls were new ; 
When these two Halls were new, my boys ; 

When these two Halls were new ! 

VII. 

And now they're standing all forlorn, 

Or turned to other use ; 
While we their sad condition mourn, 

Their ruinous abuse — 



A SKETCH OF PROFESSOR NBVIN'S UFK 469 

Their ruinous abuse, my boys ; 

Yet still they wake to view 
The times lamented that were ours, 

When these two Halls were new ; 
When these two Halls were new, my boys ; 

When these two Halls were new ! 



Lancaster, Pa., ii 



A LITANY. 
In the hour of my distress, 
When temptations me oppress, 
And when I my sins confess, 
Sweet Spirit, comfort me ! 

When I lie within my bed 
Sick in heart and sick in head, 
And with doubts discomforted, 
Sweet Spirit, comfort me ! 

When God knows I am tossed about 
Either with despair or doubt, 
Yet, before the glass is out, 
Sweet Spirit, comfort me ! 

When the Tempter me pursu'th 
With the sins of all my youth, 
Half damns me with untruth, 
Sweet Spirit, comfort me ! 

When the flames and hellish cries 
Fright mine ears and fright mine eyes, 
And all terrors me surprise, 
Sweet Spirit, comfort me ! 

When the judgment is revealed 
And that's open'd which was sealed, 
When to Thee I have appealed, 
Sweet Spirit, comfort me ! 



§ 185. A Sketch of Professor Nevin's Life. 
The early life of Professor Nevin was spent amidst natural 
surroundings, which were well calculated, to awaken and culti- 
vate his peculiar mental and moral life. He was born eighty -six 
years ago, on the 7th of February last, in the great Cumberland 
Valley, in Franklin county, Pa., a short distance westward from 
Shippensburg, in full view of the North Mountain near by and its 
sister, the South Mountain, equally as prominent in the distance. 
It was a portion of country well watered by running brooks, one 



470 PROFESSOR WILLIAM MARVEL NEVIN, LL. D. 

of which ran through the meadows not far from his father's house. 
The woodman's axe had spared many of the noble trees along the 
streams, loaded with moss or creepers, in which feathered songsters 
sang their sweetest songs, whilst flowers of every description 
decked the meadows or the hillsides. The sun rising above the 
distant mountains in the east, or sinking beneath them with its 
rich effulgence in the west, throwing its light over the magnificent 
valley, could not fail to arrest the attention -of the young, so as to 
foster in their minds a love for nature in its rural beauty. Such 
environments may exert little or no educational training upon 
some minds, not open to such outward influences; but this was 
not the case with the subject of this sketch, whose refined, sensi- 
tive nature was responsive to whatever was bright, pleasing or 
beautiful in the world around. 

His grandfather, Daniel Nevin, came from the North of Ire- 
land, in the latter part of the last century, and cast his lot among 
the Scotch-Irish settlers, who took possession of the Cumberland 
Valley, when it was still necessary for each farmer to be a soldier, 
with his rifle at hand, to defend his family against the attacks of 
a savage foe. His grandmother was a sister of Dr. Hugh Wil- 
liamson, who was on the medical staff during the American Revo- 
lution, one of the framers of the Constitution of the United States, 
and otherwise distinguished, both during and after the war, as a 
patriot and as an eminent American citizen. This relationship 
led him, from time to time, to visit the Nevin family, living along 
Herron's run, where he was always welcomed, especially by the 
nephews and nieces, nine in number. The presence of such a 
gentleman and scholar no doubt excited a permanent and quicken- 
ing influence upon the rising generation, and tended to spur them 
on to occupy .positions of influence in society, especially in the 
sphere of letters. 

The father of the family, John Nevin, was an educated man, 
possessed of more intelligence and culture than usually fall to the 
lot of farmers. Books of the best kind were at hand in the house, 
and when Dr. Williamson gave the family his valuable library as 
a legacy, in 1819, it no doubt strengthened the taste for reading, 
both among the young and the old. In connection with this there 
was a healthy spiritual atmosphere pervading the Nevin home, 
which was intensified by the deep religious tendencies of John 
Williamson, the oldest son of the family. Theirs was a house 
from which the incense of prayer and praise went up daily to 
Heaven. 



A SKETCH OF PROFESSOR NEVIN's LIFE 471 

The Middle Spring Church was not far off, in which the Rev. 
John Moody preached in his da}^ a patriarchal pastor in Israel, 
honored and reverenced by all alike. His people for a long time 
retained the religious customs of their Presbyterian ancestors, one 
of which was that old and young should be taught the Scriptures. 
"Pastoral visitation was a business, as much as preaching. The 
Schoolmaster stood by the side of the pastor as the servant of the 
Church, and the school was regarded as its necessary auxiliary, 
wmere it was usual for the teacher to examine his scholars once a 
week in the Catechism. Every Sunday evening, especially, was 
devoted, more or less, to catechization in the family. 

' ' This was a part of the Church system ; but it was only pre- 
paratory, intended simply to make room for its full operation in a 
higher form, when the work fell into the hands of the pastor, who 
regarded it as the main portion of his pastoral work. 

"All this was in harmony with the general Church life of those 
days. It was staid, systematic, grave, and somewhat sombre, 
making much account of sound doctrine ; wonderfully bound to 
old established forms, and not without a large sense of the objec- 
tive side of religion as embodied in the means of grace. There 
was much of this manifested, more particularly in the use of the 
holy sacraments. The children of Church members were all bap- 
tized with few or no exceptions, and received into the Christian 
covenant at an early age as a matter that allowed of the least pos- 
sible delay." 

This kind of religious training, under the supervision of' the 
Church, made a deep impression upon the minds of the young; 
and Professor Nevin cherished its wholesome lessons as a spiritual 
legacy, during his whole after lifetime. When, therefore, he 
entered the Reformed Church, he felt so much the more at home, 
as he there found himself surrounded with the atmosphere of an 
educational religion, similar to that which once prevailed in his 
own Church. Thus brought up in the fear, nurture and admoni- 
tion of the Lord, he was a Christian from his childhood, without 
passing through those harassing religious experiences, which his 
older brother brought with him from Union College, casting a 
cloud over his youth and a considerable part of his subsequent 
life. 

Never forgetful of the lessons thus early instilled into his mind, 
in the year 1 847 , on one occasion he visited the place in which he 
had worshipped in his youth, and not long afterwards wrote his 



472 PROFESSOR WILLIAM MARVEL NEVIN, LL. D. 

beautiful poem on the old "Middle Spring Church," from which 
we here qubte a few stanzas : 

Welcome to ine once more this lone church-yard, 

To which this June's bright morn have strolled my feet ! 

Ah ! from the village left still hitherward. 

Out-drawn am I that good old church to greet ; 

And those sad graves, to pay them homage meet 

What times I come back to this neighborhood, 

Long whiles between, where erst my childhood sweet 

Was sped ; here o'er its joys despoiled to brood; 

But though it bringeth dole the while, it doth me good. 

For me of reverence is that old church possessed, 

For in my childhood's dawn was I conveyed 

Within its dome, when was high Heaven addressed, 

Me to renew, and solemn vows were made, 

And lymphs were sprent, and holy hands were laid, 

And on me was imposed a Christian's name ; 

And when through youth's gay wildering paths I strayed, 

What wholesome truths, what heavenly counsels came ! 

The birthright then enfeoffed, oh, may I never shame ! 

The future professor received the first rudiments ol his educa- 
tion in the nearest school-house, in which Webster's spelling- 
book and Murray's English grammar were the text books. 
Advancing a step higher, he studied Ross' Latin grammar, and 
the colloquies of Corderius, the teacher of John Calvin, also pub- 
lished by Mr. Ross, whilst professor of the Ancient Languages in 
Franklin College, at Lancaster, Pa. Commencing with these ele- 
mentary works, the scholar became the peer of his teacher in his 
knowledge of the ancient classics, and probably excelled him when 
he succeeded him in the same department in Franklin and Mar- 
shall College. 

In the fall of the year 1823, John Williamson, after much hesi- 
tation, concluded to study theology, and his brother William went 
with him to Princeton, to enter the Freshman class in the Col- 
lege. It was no doubt deemed advisable by the family that the 
brothers should be near together. As the older of the two had 
not been in the enjoyment of sound health, and at times was 
inclined to become despondent, the presence of the younger 
brother, it was thought, with his wit and humor, would help to 
cheer him up whilst working hard to master the old Hebrew 
language. But the College at Carlisle was making strenuous efforts 
at this time to stand forth as one of the leading institutions in the 
land, having received a new impulse under the presidency of Dr. 



A SKETCH OF PROFESSOR NKVIN'S LIFE 473 

Mason, and the brilliant attainments of such professors as Dr. 
McClelland. Besides, in the year 1824, an arrangement was made 
by which the new Theological Seminary of the German Reformed 
Church was located at Carlisle and brought into intimate connection 
with Dickinson College. It was supposed at the time that such a 
union would be mutually beneficial ; health-giving to both insti- 
tutions, which, however, in the end, did not turn out to be the 
case. Under these circumstances, it was most likely the new 
spirit of progress in education at Carlisle, together with the fact 
that the father of the family had graduated in the place, had its 
influence in bringing the son from Princeton back to Pennsylva- 
nia. He entered the Sophomore class in Dickinson College, and 
graduated from that institution in the year 1827. During this 
time he formed his first slight acquaintance with the Theological 
Seminary, with which in after years he became very closely con- 
nected. He saw it in his infancy ; and he lived long enough to 
see it full-grown, invested with power in the theological and reli- 
gious world. 

Nothing of a special interest or importance has come down to 
us respecting his career at College. It was no doubt a quiet and 
unobtrusive one, just as might be expected from his temperament 
and character, exhibiting reverence and respect for his teachers, 
punctuality and regularity in the discharge of his duties. His 
genial nature found free exercise as he travelled along the flowery 
walks of literature ; and if at times it seemed to be repressed by the 
study of mathematics — a useful discipline to one in his situation — 
it found ample range during vacations, when he returned to his 
home, and meandered along the Run, in the shadow of the dim, 
purple mountain, toward the setting sun. One incident occurred 
just as he was about to receive his diploma on Commencement 
Day, which was not very soon forgotten. The subject of his 
graduating speech was the "Transmigration of Souls," which 
disappointed the large audience present in the church in a rather 
agreeable way. The speaker was tall, slender, very serious in 
his looks, and apparently too diffident to open his mouth. Most 
persons expected something of the nature of a learned dissertation 
on Hindu or Pythagorean theology ; but before they had time to 
settle themselves down to profound thinking, they were carried 
away with roars of laughter, which filled the house from the 
beginning to the end of the oration, abounding as it did with an 
outflow of rich, original and genuine humor. The voice was 



474 PROFESSOR WILLIAM MARVEL NEVIN, EE. D. 

slender no less than the body, but it was modulated with the skill 
of an artist, and so the sense of the speech came out with the more 
telling effect. It was one of the few College performances that 
was long remembered, and often referred to in after years by those 
who heard it. 

As the grand-uncle, Dr. Williamson, was a distinguished phy- 
sician in his day, it is more than likely that it was the admira- 
tion of the grand-nephew for his character that induced him, 
after he had graduated, to take up the study of medicine. His 
interest in that branch of literature, however, especially its surgical 
element, did not last long, and he concluded to enter upon a course 
of legal study, which he pursued for some time. But neither of 
these two professions was adapted to his taste. If he was admitted 
to the bar, as it is said he was, he never practiced or put out his 
card. His native genius asserted itself, and he turned his attention 
to teaching as a more suitable employment for a time, at least, if 
not for life. 

In the year 1830 his brother, Dr. Nevin, entered upon his duties 
as professor of theology in the Western Theological Seminary in 
Allegheny City, and this most probably had the effect to turn his 
attention to the West as his future field of labor. For a short 
period he taught a classical school in Lancaster, Ohio, and then 
afterwards we find him acting as an assistant teacher in a Female 
Seminary at Braddock's Field, under the charge of Mrs. Olver. 
In the year 1834 he had charge of a high school at Niles, Michi- 
gan, the residence of his brother-in-law, Dr. Finley, at one time 
professor of Natural Science in Dickinson College, and subsequently 
highty distinguished as a physician. The wanderer in search of a 
permanent vocation remained at Niles for about one year, after- 
wards taught for a short time at Zelienople, and subsequently 
went to Sewickley, where, with Mr. J. B. Champ, he conducted a 
Boys' High School. Here, along the banks of the Ohio River, in 
the midst of the most romantic and picturesque scenery, among 
pleasant friends and relatives, he would have doubtless been 
content to spend the remainder of his life, had not the voice of 
Providence called him into a higher field of usefulness, at Mer- 
cersburg, not far from his native place in Franklin county. 

Whilst teaching in the Seminary at Braddock, Professor Nevin 
was associated for a time with his brother, Dr. Nevin, as one of 
the editors of the Friend, a weekly paper established by the 
Young Men's Society of Pittsburgh and vicinity. It was unsec- 



A SKETCH OF PROFESSOR NEVIN'S LIFE 475 

tarian in its character, intended to promote moral, religious and 
philanthropic objects, especially the cause of Temperance. It, 
however, assumed that it had a right to take a wider range of 
topics. It freely discussed books, questions in literature, science, 
and sometimes in German philosophy or theology. Occasionally 
it referred to Slavery as a great evil in this country, in very mod- 
erate language ; and once it went so far as to denounce it as a 
national sin. At the time there was much sensitiveness, both 
among politicians and church people, and it was thought that the 
least that was said about the matter the better. Although the 
paper was intended for the purpose of promoting moral reforms or 
the suppression of all kinds of vice and wickedness, the breath of 
Abolitionism was supposed to be on its garments . Opposition was 
aroused against it, and, conducted as it was with much ability, it 
lived only a few years, and then ceased to be any longer published. 
As the editing of such a journal imposed too much labor upon Dr. 
Nevin, in addition to his duties in the Seminary, he called in his 
brother to relieve him of a part of his burden. With their gener- 
ous natures they labored together in this way without any com- 
pensation, under the consciousness that they were promoting the 
best interests of the community — pro bono publico. 

It fell to the lot of the junior editor to gather up suitable selec- 
tions from other journals — sometimes from good books which 
w T ere often much the best — especially poetry, in which he always 
displayed good taste. Sometimes he prepared articles of his own, 
under his own initials, which were of a pleasant, exhilarating 
character. From his readiness in calling up an appropriate quo- 
tation, in prose or verse, when needed, it is evident that he was 
quite familiar with the great masters of English literature. Occa- 
sionally, in addition to his prose, a neat little poem of his own, like 
the "Fender," made its appearance in some part of the paper. 
His style of writing, with which his students have become familiar, 
was already formed, resembling in some respects that of Gold- 
smith or Irving, but manifestly it was his own, and no imitation 
of that of any favorite author. It is evident that he had found 
his choice of life in the realms of literature : that he preferred to 
become a man of letters, as well as a teacher. Once, in an edi- 
torial, he naively remarked, in the way of explanation, that his 
object in writing for the Friend was to supply it with lighter 
articles, which, if once read, might induce the readers to peruse 
such as were more profound and solid. The literary and refined 



476 PROFESSOR WIEEIAM MARVEL NEVIN, LE. D. 

appearance of the Friend was largely due to his pen and over- 
sight. 

He removed to Mercersburg in the fall of the year 1840, where 
he took charge of the department of Ancient Languages and Belles- 
Lettres in Marshall College. He was re-elected to the same posi- 
tion in Franklin and Marshall College in 1853, an d i* 1 a ^l remained 
at his post for fifty- two years, until during the present year, 1892, 
he was called up to a higher position in the world of the True, 
the Beautiful, and the Good. 

It was with little or no difficulty that Professor Nevin adapted 
himself to his new sphere of labor. He was a Scottish man by 
ancestry, and the people among whom he was called to labor were 
Germanic ; but both races were of Teutonic origin ; and he saw 
at once that there was much that was common in their life and 
religious tendencies, more intellectually than emotionally inclined ; 
and that both, when true to their history, were constitutionally 
attached to educational religion, and in favor of the catechetical 
system of instruction, instituted in the primitive ages of Chris- 
tianity. He did not come among these cousins merely to teach 
Latin and Greek. From the start he felt that the College, as the 
representative of a religious communion, had a vast and import- 
ant work to accomplish. It was for this large constituency, as he 
used to say, he regarded it as an honor to labor, and in it he felt 
he would be happy to live. 

He left it to others to speculate and engage in the solution of 
abstruse questions. He believed that it was his calling to teach 
thinkers how to express their thoughts, and to clothe them in such 
language as might at once appear both interesting and transparent 
to other minds. The ancient classics, Greek and Latin, were the 
models after which a perspicuous and elevated style of writing is 
most readily acquired. 

From the time of Horace and Longinus, down to our time, they 
have been the "exemplaria," which have been regarded as the 
normal form of style by all, with few exceptions, who have been 
most successful in literature or oratory. For many years it was 
the office of Professor Nevin to hold up these exemplars of a 
refined, classic taste for the instruction of his students; and in 
elucidating their artistic excellence, he was eminently successful. 
The spirit in which this was done, moreover, was well calculated 
to throw a glow of life over their classic pages. 

He, however, by no means thought that Greek and Latin writers 



A SKETCH OF PROFESSOR NEVIN'S EIFE 477 

had said the last word in the field of letters. He had himself 
mastered English literature, poetry and prose, under its best forms, 
and as opportunities presented themselves, with a nice discrimina- 
tion he was wont to point out what was of superior excellence in 
these classic models, formed out of our own native language. At 
the very beginning, in the discharge of his duties at Mercersburg, 
he sought to stimulate his students to excel in English composi- 
tion. For a time he was accustomed to read their compositions 
in the class-room, pointing out their defects, and usually arranging 
them in the order of merit, from the best down to the worst. 
Many of his scholars, whilst they are thankful for the training in 
pure thinking which they received in the Mercersburg school, will 
be free to acknowledge their indebtedness for the helpful stimulus 
they received from their teacher, when he taught them how to 
express their thoughts in beautiful and graceful language. Nor 
will they forget how he sometimes treated what they regarded as 
their choicest figures, because too many of them became mixed 
up together and were not in their right places. 

Gradually the students came to appreciate more and better his 
special calling in the College as a teacher of the English language, 
pure and undefiled; and as it were by one spontaneous impulse, 
in the year 1872, the Alumni resolved to endow the new chair of 
English Literature and Belles -Lettres, in the College, which he 
was to occupy. It was a happy thought ; though never as yet 
fully carried out, it excited a salutary effect upon the mind of the 
professor. He was not satisfied simply to use old text books, 
but began to write out lectures of his own on English Literature, 
in which he treated his subject within necessary limits historically, 
philosophically and critically, from the dawn of literature in Europe, 
and then more fully as it flowed down through an English channel, 
to the present time. Corrected, polished, and enlarged from year 
to year, these lectures, exhibiting much ability, freshness and 
originality, are admirably adapted to meet the wants of students, 
readers, and scholars generally. 



The intercourse of our much venerated professor with his 
students was always of a very pleasant character, and he suffered 
less from their practical jokes than generally falls to the lot of 
College professors, his long service being considered. Usually 
they ended well — in the discomfiture of the jokers themselves. 



478 PROFESSOR WILLIAM MARVKL NBVIN, LL. D. 

At a certain time a class made tip its mind to be excused from one 
of its recitations, and to accomplish this some one opened the pipe 
of the stove and filled the room with smoke. When the professor 
entered the room, without a smile, an angry look or word, he 
directed the students to take their seats as usual. He, however, 
placed his own chair near the open door, and he then heard the 
class recite in an atmosphere of almost Stygian darkness, which 
increased in density until the bell rang out the recitation. Some 
other comic, humorous, but effective rebukes from the professor 
of polite literature, still live in the memories of old students. 

Professor Nevin entered upon his duties at Mercersburg in such 
a quiet and undemonstrative manner that it took some time before 
the students came to know his value as a man. His apparently 
latent talents and ability, however, once on a prominent occasion, 
came out incidentally, somewhat in the same way they did at Car- 
lisle, but in a much more mature degree, at the laying of the 
corner-stone of one of the literary halls. He was requested to 
make an address. David Paul Brown, of Philadelphia, delivered 
the oration of the day, with his usual, fervid Irish eloquence, and 
he was afterwards requested by the town people to deliver one of 
his humorous addresses in the evening. The latter was a laughable 
affair and amused the audience very highly. The address of Pro- 
fessor Nevin was expected to be too literary for most persons to 
listen to on a hot afternoon. His theme was "National Taste," 
and fears were entertained that it might present an unfavorable 
contrast as compared with the efforts of the great orator from 
Philadelphia. But, although delivered with a weak voice, and not 
at all promising in the beginning, it turned out to be a most admir- 
able performance, sparkling with a natural, unaffected wit or 
humor, and delivered with true histrionic art. It came down 
upon the perspiring audience like a refreshing shower in July, and 
Mr. Brown did not carry off all the laurels to Philadelphia, but 
left a portion of them behind at Mercersburg. 

The address on "National Taste" was a finished production, 
and it will continue to be read with pleasure and profit. Many 
other interesting effusions flowed from the same pen, such as 
articles for the public press, graceful poems for albums, and col- 
loquies or dialogues for the literary societies. Strange to say he 
did not preserve copies of them, and it would be difficult for us 
now to mention them all by their names or titles. 

The spirit of the College was predominently German from the 



A SKETCH OP PROFESSOR NEVIN'S EIEE 479 

beginning, but it was intended to be an American institution also, 
and Professor Nevin, in his long career, performed an important 
service in imparting to the institution an Anglican or American 
element ; and thus it assumed an Anglo-German character, just 
what it was intended to be by its founders and friends. 

The professor had many qualities in common with his brother, 
Dr. J. W. Nevin, such as reverence for truth, sincerity, honesty in 
its highest and noblest sense, a deep moral and religious earnest- 
ness, a love for the loftiest ideals, and a contempt for deceit, hypoc- 
risy or shams ; but in the salient points of their mental constitu- 
tions they differed widely, the one apparently complementing the 
other in their diversified gifts. In the one the intellect predomi- 
nated ; in the other, the imagination,, obedient to faith, was the 
more prominent in the flow of mental activity. Together they 
were ' ' a noble pair of brothers. ' ' 

Professor Nevin 's family relations were of the most agreeable 
kind, if we ma3^ judge from the atmosphere which such a gentle, 
noble man might be expected to throw around him in the family 
circle. Whilst his physical strength was declining and his hear- 
ing failing him, thus cutting him off in a great measure from social 
intercourse, his mental activity, his vivacity, and his inborn 
sparkling humor, did not change. Always cheerful, never sad, 
sitting by his fireside with his manuscripts before him, he wel- 
comed his visiting friends with a countenance as radiant and cheerful 
as it was in days long gone by. His wife, his congenial companion 
for many years, one son and three daughters watched over him, 
and sought to promote his comfort with the tenderest interest and 
affection. Martha, Alban Mellier, Annie and Marie were present 
to congratulate him on the anniversary of his eighty -sixth birthday, 
which happened on the lord's Day. Four grandchildren came 
with their parents, among whom was little Rebecca Kremer, who 
for a dozen years had celebrated her own birthdays with her grand- 
father on the same day. A nephew from Pittsburgh, also present, 
had reached another milestone at the same time — Mr. Theodore 
Williamson Nevin , editor of the Pittsburgh Leader. Although the 
premonitions of the approaching change were at hand, the com- 
munion in this interesting and lovely family was of the sweetest 
kind ; yet it was felt that it would become sweeter still in nobler 
realms above. The head of the family fell asleep only a few days 
afterwards, on Thursday, the nth of February, 1892. 

— College Student, April, 1892. 



INDEX 



abeurd, 21. 
■^*- Addison, Joseph, 302. 
Adam of St. Victor, 39. 
Age, The Classic, 310. 
Augustin Age, The, 298. 
Aidan, 78. 

Albion's England, 214. 
Alcnin, 89. 
Alexius, 10. 

Alfred The Great, 89-91. 
Alfric, 92. 
Allan, Robert, 366. 
Ad Exequas, 36. 
Aldhelm, 97. 
Aeschylus, 370. 
Allegorical Poetry, 163. 
Alfred of Beverly, 15. 
Alaric, 75. 
Alexander VI, 51. 
Anlaff, 130. 
Ambrose, St., 37. 
Angevin Kings, in. 
Angles and Saxons, 75. 
Anglo-Norman Period, 106. 
Anglo-Gallic, 287. 
Anglo-Saxon Literature, 80. 
Anne, Queen, 301. 
Anne of Cleves, 197. 
Anselm, 21, 104. 
Antique, The, 63. 
Apostles' Creed, 252. 
Aquinas, Thomas, 21. 
Arcadia, The, 220. 
Armada, The, 218 
Arnold, Matthew, 425. 
Arabian Tales, 165. 
Arthurian Romances, 125. 
Aristotle, 23. 
Ariosto, 55. 
Arthelba, 78. 
Ascham, Roger, 255. 
Arts, The, 52. 
Asiatic Goths, 133. 
Avon and Avoca, 359. 
Augustine, 80. 

T3ACON, Francis, 270. 

Bacon, Roger, 151. 
Baldwin of Flanders, 10. 
Ballads, Old Scottish, 340. 
Baxter, Richard, 284. 
Bayard, 16. 



Ballads, 141-155. 
Bards of the Lowlanders, 350. 
Beda, 87. 

Beaumont, F., 242. 
Bentham, Jeremy, 449. 
Bentley, Richard, 291. 
Beowulf, 183. 
Berkeley, George, 303. 
Bernard of Clairvaux, 42. 
Bernard of Morlaix, 42. 
Bernicia, 77. 
Bertha, 80. 
Biscop, Benedict, 87. 
Black Death, 162. 
Breton, Nicholas, 223. 
Bretwalda, 78. 
Brittania, 73. 
Boccaccio, Giovanni, 26. 
Boleyn, Anne, 183. 
Bolingbroke, Viscount, 299. 
Borimini, 43. 
Boswell, James, 304. 
Browning, Robert, 433. 
Brunnetto, I,attini, 13. 
Brut d'Angleterre, 113. 
Bunyan, John, 281. 
Burgundians, 19. 
Burke, Edmund, 304. 
Burns, Robert, 368. 
Byron, Lord, 400. 

pAMERONIANS, 365. 

^" Campbell, Thomas, 356. 
Canterbury Tales, 28, 143. 
Catullus, 33. 
Carry le, Thomas, 381. 
Cardinal Carnpeggio, 182. 
Christian Missionaries, 377. 
Churchill, Charles, 307. 
Celtic Wit and 
Cervantes, 286. 
Civil War, The, 297. 
Claverhouse, John James, 366. 
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 381. 
Colloquy, No. 1 — The Farmer's Mis- 
take, 452. 
Colloquy, No. 2 — Capt. Woodberry, 

459- 
Coleman, George, 308. 
Columba, St., 77. 
Congreve, William, 307. 
Conrad, Emperor of Germany, 10. 
Cotter's Saturday Night, 344. 



482 



INDEX 



Courts of Iyove, 10. 
Cowper, William, 378. 
Cranmer, Archbishop, 191. 
Culloden, 353. 
Cunningham, Allan, 366. 

T~\amiani, ST. PETER, 42. 

^- J Damietta, 10. 

Daniel, Samuel, 240. 

Dante, Alighieri, 77. 

Dark Ages, 97. 

Decalogue, 252. 

Decline of Anglo-Saxon, 98. 

Deira, 77. 

Dekker, Thomas, 242. 

Dialectics, 22. 

Dickens, Charles, 424. 

Discovery of America, 52. 

Divorce and Wolsey's Fall, 181, 

Doctor Faustus, 234. 

Dominium Directum, 3. 

Dominicans, The, 151. 

Donne, John, 273. 

Douglas Tragedy, The, 156. 

Douglas, Gawin, 357. 

Drama and Puritanism, 245. 

Dramatic Songs, 247. 

Drayton, William, 220. 

Dryden, John, 2. 

Druids, The, 96. 

Duke, Robert, 104. 

Dunbar, William, 357. 

Duncan Gray, 364. 

Dun Scotus, 21. 

Dunstan, St., 91. 

Duke Naimes, 18. 

Durham Gospels, 90. 

Edinburgh Review, 380. 
Edward, 1. 
Eastern Empire, 51. 
Edward VI., 197. 
Edwin, King, 78. 
Eighteenth Centurjs 302. 
Ethelbert, 78. 
Eliot, George, 312. 
Elizabethan Era, 212. 
Elizabethan Prose, 273. 
English Castles, 168. 
English Chronicle, 93. 
English Prayer Book, 209. 
English Drama, 228. 
Emmet, Robert, 358. 
Erasmus, 173. 
Eric, Blodox, 130. 
Erigena, Johannes Scotus, 21. 
Erin, 74. 

Etheredge, Sir George, 307. 
Euler, Iveonhard, 448. 
Euphuism, 215. 



European Races, 73. 
Exeter Codex, 90. 

T^abuaux, 165. 
-*- Ferrarius, 43. 
Fatalism, 82. 
Feudal System, 1. 
Fifth Monarchy-Men, 287. 
Florence, 25. 
Ford, John, 243. 
Franciscans, 151. 
Franco-English, 287. 
Franks, The, 19. 
Franklin, Benjamin, 309. 
Fletcher, John, 223. 
Frederick Barbarossa, 10. 
Frederick II, 10. 
Free Kirk, The, 450. 
Friar Bacon, 235. 
FulkofAnjou, 105. 
FulkNeri, 118. 

GEOFFREY GAIMAR, I07. 
Geoffrey the Handsome, 15, 105. 
Geoffrey of Monmouth, 15, 122. 
Galilei Galileo, 23. 
Gascoigne, George, 220. 
Gardiner, Stephen, 185. 
Garrick, David, 304. 
Genevan Catechism, 257-. 
Genseric, 75. 
Giotto, 64. 

Gibbon, Edward, 304. 
Godfrey of Bouillon, 10. 
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 377, 48,377 
Goldsmith, Oliver, 304. 
Golden Targe, 352. 
Good Women, Legends of, 147. 
Goths, 19. 
Gower, John, 137 
Graal, The Holy, 123. 
Gregory of Tours, 39. 
Gray, Thomas, 314. 
Green, Robert, 221. 
Guevara, 255. 
Guido, d'Arezzo, 62. 
Guy of Warwick, 13. 



TTacon, 130. 



Hales, Alexander, 21. 
Halls, These Two, 468. 
Havelock, 13. 

Helen, Mother of Constantine, 75. 
Helpful Agencies, 290. 
Henry I, 15. 
Hengist and Horsa, 86. 
Henry II, 15. 
Henry's Charter, 103. 
Henry VIII, 178. 
Henry of Huntingdon, 104. 



INDEX 



483 



Heptarchy, 77. 
Herrick, Robert, 258. 
Hey wood, John, 230. 
Highlanders, 339. 
Highland Poets, 352. 
Hilary, St., 38. 
Hilda, St., 86. 
Hobbes, Thomas, 292. 
Homilies, 90. 
Hooker, Richard, 263. 
Hopkins, John, 251. 
Horace, 33. 
Humanism, 50. 
Hnmber, The, 77. 
Humorous, The, 243. 

TNG^KHARD, 230. 

■*- Introduction of Christianity, 74. 

Iona, 81-86. 

Irish Melodies, 358. 

Irving, Washington, 409. 

Jane Seymour, 197. 
Jargon, A, 289. 
Jerusalem, 10. 
John, King, 162. 
Jongleurs, 19. 
Johnson, Samuel, 298. 
Jones, Sir William, 376. 
Jonson, Benjamin, 240-242 
Julius Agricola, 74. 
Julius Caesar, 74. 
Jutes, 77. 

T7"ETHE, WiEEiAMj 251. 
-*-*- King Arthur, 11. 
King Horn, 13. 
Kings of England, 283. 
Kirk, The Haunted, 342, 
Kitty of Coleraine, 362. 
Knighthood, 4. 
Knox, John, 251. 
Koran, 24. 
Kyng, John, 229. 

T ADY OF THE CaSTEE, 7. 

■*~* Lamb, Charles, 419. 
Langue d'Oc, 11. 
Langue d'Oil, n. 
Langley, William, 137. 
Latimer, Hugh, 195. 
Laura de Noves, 
Leading Minds, 292. 
Leo X, 32. 
Lillo, George, 308. 
Light of Asia, The, 378. 
Lindsay, David. 
Lingua Romana, 114. 
Lingua Teutonica, 19. 
Litany, A, 



Litterse Humaniores, 50. 
Locke, John, 291. 
Lochiel's Warning, 353. 
Lollardism, 140. 
Lombard, Peter, 21. 
Longfellow, Henry W., 417. 
Longobards, 19. 
Long Parliament, The, 297. 
Lord Ullin's Daughter, 356. 
Lord's Prayer, The, 252. 
Love of Nature, Chaucer's, 148. 
Lovelace, Richard, 260. 
Lowlanders, 229-363. 
Luther, Martin, 187. 
Lydgate, John, 158. 
Lyly, John, 241. 
Lyric Poetry, 257. 

"TV /TABINOGION, 154. 



1V± 



Malek Kamel, 10. 



Macaulay, T. Babington, 420. 

Mandeville, Bernard de, 303. 

Mandeville, Sir John, 103. 

Malory, Sir Thomas, 255. 

March-Men, 34. 

Mariner, The Ancient, 371. 

Marot's Psalms and Spiritual Songs, 

250. 
Marston, John, 243. 
Mass, The, 195. 
Mask, The, 240. 
Massinger, Philip, 240. 
Mary, Queen, 199. 
Mary Stuart, 210. 
Matilda, 15, 104. 
Mediaeval Plays, 28. 
Mediaeval Forms, 34. 
Mediaeval Hymns, 35. 
Melrose Mission Station, 96. 
Metrical Forms, 34. 
Metrical Romances, 143. 
Middleton, Thomas, 242. 
Milton, John, 276. 
Millenium, 97. 
Modern Spirit, 296. 
Mohammed, 10. 
Monastic Chronicles, 121. 
More, Sir Thomas, 171. 
Moore, Thomas, 357. 
Moralities, 169. 

AT ATIONAE TASTE, 437- 

f^ Neale, Dr., 37. 
Noah, 29. 

/^vcceeve, Thomas, 158. 
^-^ Old Learning, 172. 
Ormin, 116. 
Ordeal of Battle, 19. 
I Order of the Temple, 14. 



484 



INDEX 



Order of St. John, 14. 
Ossian, 384. 
Oswald, King, 78. 
Otway, Thomas, 307. 

T)AINTING, 60. 

-*- Pamphlets, 216. 

Pageants, 230. 

Paraphrase, 87. 

Parliament, The, 207. 

Papal Court, 25. 

Party Literature, 310. 

Pastoral, The, 219. 

Pathos, 311. 

Patrick, St., 86. 

Pecock, Reginald, 255. 

Percy's Reliques, 374. 

Peter of Amiens, the Hermit, 9. 

Petrarch, Francis, 26. 

Philip Augustus, 10. 

Philip of Spain, 204. 

Picts and Scots, 75. 

Piers the Plowman, 137. 

Pindaric Odes, 280. 

Planta Genestae, 159. 

Plato, 23. 

Poe, Edgar Allan, 385. 

Poetical Satire, 249. 

Pope, Alexander, 299. 

Pope Gregory, 79. 

Pope Urban, 9-1 1. 

Prudentius, 36. 

Prynne, William, 247. 

Psalter, The, 253. 

Pulci, Iyuigi, 55. 

Puritan Age, The, 283. 

Quarts, Francis, 25, 7. 
Questions, 96. 
Quincey, Thomas de, 383. 

"p ai,e;igh, Sir Wai/tkr, 266. 
^ Randolph, Thomas, 240. 
Realism, 21. 
Red Cross, The, 9. 
Reinecke Fuchs, 11. 
Renaissance, 49, et passim. 
Revolution, The, 286. 
Restoration, The, 295. 
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 304. 
Revival of Letters, 23. 
Rhyme in Latin Verse, 29. 
Richard Coeur de Lion, 10. 
Roland, 18. 
Robin Hood, 134. 
Roman Conquest, The, 74. 
Roman de Renard, 11. 
Roman de la Rose, 11. 
Romances of Chivalry, 167. 
Rory O'More, 362. 



Roscellin, 21. 

Round Table, The, 13-123. 

Ruprecht, 135. 

Ruskin, John, 427. 

Q^ABRINA, I08. 

^ Sackville, Thomas, 232. 

Saladin, 10. 

Sannazaro, Jacopo, 220. 

Satan, 62. 

Saxon Chronicle, The, 81. 

Scalds, the Polishers of Language, 130. 

Scandinavians, 129. 

Schiller, Frederic, 381. 

Scholasticism, 21. 

Scott, vSir Walter, 370. 

Scottish Ballads, 337. 

Scottish Character, 341. 

Scottish Dialect, 343. 

Scottish Poets, 346. 

Seat Perilous, 109. 

Shaftesbury, 303. 

Shams, 70. 

Shakespeare, 235. 

His Predecessors, 234. 

His Style and Influence, 238. 

His Method of Construction, 239. 

His Characters, 239. 
Shepherd's Calendar, The, 220. 
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 407. 
Sheridan, Richard, 308. 
Sidney, Sir Philip, 266. 
Sigourney, Lydia Huntly, 445. 
Sir Lancelot, 11. 
Sir Tristam, 14. 
Sir Gawain, 15. 

Sketch of Prof. Nevin's Life, 470. 
Slave Market at Rome, 79. 
Sophocles, 370. 
Southey, Robert, 400. 
Spaniards, The, 59. 
Spectator, The, 309. 
Spenser, Edmund, 218. 

His Fairy Queen, 224. 

His Romanticism, 226. 

His Sense of Beauty, 227. 

His Smaller Poems, 232. 
Suckling, Sir John, 259. 
Supernatural, The, 319. 
St. Odo of Cluny. 

npAM O'ShanTKR, 346. 
-L Tattler, 309. 
Taine, Hippolyte Adolphe, 286. 
Tara's Halls, 360. 
Tennyson, Alfred, 423. 
The Ten Commandments, 252. 
Tyndale, William, 189. 
Thackeray, William M., 423. 
Thomson, James, 379. 
Trarjslations of the Bible, English, 190. 



INDEX 



485 



URBAN VIII, 43. 
Udall, Roister Doister, 
las, 233. 
Utopia, 174. 

T7ANBRDGH, 308. 

^ Van Eyck, 64. 
Vasco De Gama, 71. 
Vassali, 2. 

Venantius Fortunatus, 39. 
Vernon L,ee, Violet Paget, 7. 
Vespucci, 71. 
Virgil, 25. 

tttace, Robert, 115. 
^ * Wager of Battle, 8. 
Walter Map, 15-104. 
Warburton, William, 299. 
Wever, R., 229. 



Whetstone, 220. 
Nicho- White, Henrv Kirke, 451. 
Whitby, 86. 

Whittingham, W., 257. 
! Wickliffe, John, 139. 
William the Conqueror, 100. 
William the Red, 103. 
William of Malmesbury, 104. 
William and Mary, 285. 
Wolsey, Thomas, 179. 
Wordsworth, William, 388. 
Wycherley, William, 308. 

T^ORK, 75 . 
-* Young, Edward, 379. 

yACHARIAH, GHIRLANDAGO'S, 64. 



